Director: David Yates
Selling a fentanyl-based painkiller turns a broke single mother into a rising executive almost overnight, and the film tracks exactly how fast that kind of money corrodes everything it touches.
What is Pain Hustlers about?
Liza Drake is behind on rent, working a strip-club shift to make ends meet, when a chance meeting lands her a sales job at a struggling pharmaceutical startup pushing a powerful opioid spray meant for cancer patients. She turns out to be a natural, and the company's founder promotes her fast, rewarding results without asking too many questions about how she gets them. Bonuses, incentive trips, and a growing sales team follow as Liza and her colleagues chase doctors willing to prescribe off-label, dangling perks that blur into outright bribery. The film moves briskly through boardroom bravado and late-night celebration before the inevitable arrives: prescriptions written for patients who don't need the drug, overdoses that can't be waved away, and a company built on numbers nobody wants to audit too closely. Framed partly as testimony to investigators after the fact, the story treats its own charm and energy as part of the trap, letting the audience feel the pull before the reckoning lands.
Cast & crew
Emily Blunt plays Liza with a mix of desperation and hustle that makes her rise believable scene by scene, while Chris Evans, as the company's founder, leans fully into the character's manic, self-mythologizing sales pitch. Catherine O'Hara adds sharp comic timing as Liza's mother, and Andy García appears as the company's quieter, more calculating money man.
Context & significance
The film draws loosely on real events surrounding an opioid manufacturer whose sales practices led to federal prosecutions, though names and details are altered for the fictionalized telling. Director David Yates, known for large-scale franchise work, brings a leaner, faster pace here, cutting between mockumentary-style interviews and the unfolding scheme itself. It arrives as part of a wave of recent films examining the human cost of the opioid crisis from the inside of the industry that fueled it.
Where & how to watch
The film streams on K-Time with Persian subtitles and a Persian dub, inside an interface built in Farsi for Iranian audiences abroad. Watching requires only a free K-Time account; the page itself can be read without signing in first.