Pain Hustlers Ending Explained: Emily Blunt plays a broke but ambitious single mom in this Netflix movie releasing on October 27, 2023, who desperately seeks to pull herself out of a viciously unsuccessful life. In the most unconventional meet-cutes of all, she stumbles upon Chris Evans’ Pete Brenner, a drug representative at the failing pharmaceutical startup Zanna Therapeutics. Once she starts working there, her big American dream doesn’t seem too far off her grasp, but it costs her more than she could’ve anticipated before.
The American crime drama film loosely based on a real events has been directed by David Yates from Wells Tower’s screenplay. Also starring Andy Garcia, Catherine O’Hara, Jay Duplass, Brian d’Arcy James and Chloe Coleman, it’s based on Evan Hughes’ book of the same name and adds on to the OTT sphere’s current obsession with the opioid crisis.
-Pain Hustlers Netflix Ending Explained Contains Spoilers-
Pain Hustlers begins with the introduction of Blunt’s character, Liza Drake, whose coming into Zanna Therapeutics works as a pathbreaking rise for the company. As a high school dropout, when she walks in for the interview with Pete Brenner, he writes her up a new resume, filling her in as a PHD and whatnot to boast their new hire to the big pocket man investing in the company – Dr Jack Neel (Andy Garcia).
Instantly impressed by her stance, he green lights this hire, making way for great opportunities for her to cash in on and help support her daughter. Yet trouble soon finds her once she lands up in the same old circle of a criminal conspiracy surrounding the opioid crisis.
Pain Hustlers Ending Explained
Zanna’s business model was already fractured and the company was just as desperate to take off the ground as was Liza Drake. They started off by recruiting quite a few attractive people. Through this move, the company toyed with the doctors’ emotions, ultimately signing up deals with them and eventually even bribing them (through the “speakers program”) to write up their pain-relieving medicine Lonafen to patients.
When the operation finally took off, the company personnel’s greed surpassed even greater heights. Jack Neel’s brand had already tried out every rule in and off the book to target specific doctors, but Neel eventually got tired of seeing the company reel in the same numbers every now and then. To kick the sales number a notch higher, he suggests Pete and Liza to start selling these meds off category too, which would mean that doctors wouldn’t just be prescribing the pain-reliever to Cancer patients as it was originally intended for, but also to patients dealing with mild and chronic pains due to other illnesses, even headaches.
Loosely based on the operations led by Insys Therapeutics pushing for the sales of their fentanyl-based drug Subsys, the film then takes the last turn for the worse as at it actually pulls through with the sales of the drug to go off-category, opening up the conversation to overdose and addiction among patients. And then, Liza is the only one left with a shred of conscience, as she watches people succumb to the drug overdose of this ill-prescribed medicine. She rises up as the whistleblower and helpes bring the scandal to light by taking the matter to court.
While at first, Jack Neel’s involvement in the mess is brushed under wraps, thankfully, due to Liza’s mother’s brief relationship with the man, Liza was able to lay her hands on his response via email to her, and the conversation thread openly reveals his knowledge on the matter of paying off doctors. Dr Lydell, the first doctor who’d been approached by Liza, is also caught red-handed as a covert officer busts him in action, prescribing him Lonafen for a minor pain that has nothing to do with cancer.
Finally, in court, all these people are found liable for their misconduct and are sentenced to imprisonment. Dr Lydell is sentenced to a period of 40 months, Pete Brenner gets 36 months in jail, Dr Jack Neel gets 66 months. And while the bust was possible due to Liza coming forward, her statement is believed to be a genuine outpour and the government also recommends that she’s not taken in, but she too is held accountable as her greed cost lives, and is sentenced to a period of incarceration of 1 year and 3 months.
Andy Garcia’s character Jack Neel filled in for the real-life founder of Insys – John Kapoor; Chris Evan’s character also possibly takes after Michael Babich, a man who was working closely with Kapoor and was also the CEO of the brand at the time the scandal broke out. Emily Blunt’s Liza Drake then probably takes inspiration from Maria Guzman, the real-life whistleblower who raised the alarm against the company.
The movie also puts across that Zanna hadn’t been fully open about Lonafen’s usage. The case studies, as revealed by the fictional Elliot Hartigan – who authored the Lonafen study – though accurate, showed that the drug was only administered to opioid tolerant patients by responsible doctors who weren’t cranking up the dosage as per their convenience. Plus, the clinical subjects for the study were all strictly stage 4 cancer patients.
Lastly, the film also takes the creative liberty to show us what happened to Liza, Jackie aka her mother, and some of the sale reps from Zanna after she’s relieved from her sentence. (Not much has been revealed about what went down with Maria Guzman, so we can’t essentially link this up to her person) Liza and her mother go on to start their own skincare brand – Drake Natural Skincare – using the same strategy they’d been talking about at the beginning of the film to market Jackie’s skincare products, and it works.
Pain Hustlers movie is now streaming on Netflix.
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