Emily Blunt and Chris Evans headline the satirical comedy Pain dealersby David Yates (four of Harry Potter), how fentanyl established itself on the market.
The story is similar to that of the OxyContin epidemic described in the excellent Disney+ series “Dopesick” starring Michael Keaton and then in Netflix’s lesser “Painkiller,” except “Merchants of Pain” focuses exclusively on the manner focuses on how salespeople and particularly attractive saleswomen succeeded in pushing fentanyl as the painkiller of choice… and the way in which the sales methods brought about the start-up’s demise.
“The secret is finding the thin gray line,” says Pete Brenner (Chris Evans), marketing director of a pharmaceutical company that is on the verge of bankruptcy and needy single mother Liza Drake (Emily Blunt) invests his desperation in his new job . And it works. So much so that Pete and Liza have to recruit several dozen new salespeople, who are all the more passionate about their job because the company pays them $100 per prescription.
“Doctors are just as greedy and obsessed as everyone else,” Liza says in voiceover in one of her particularly hurtful comments at doctor meetings. The screenplay, written by Wells Tower, is an adaptation of Evan Hughes’ book, which details how the start-up made millions while revealing that both the pharmaceutical industry and the healthcare system are in shambles.
Despite, or perhaps because of, the biting humor, the 122-minute feature film can be watched as if you were devouring a thriller. By continually marveling at how reality surpasses the craziest fictions, and by wanting to demand, after viewing it, not a revision, but a complete overhaul of the system.
Merchants of Pain will be on screens from October 20th and on Netflix from October 27th.
Rating: 3.5 out of 5