Television Review | The Canadian drama follows the opioid crisis from three points of view, but emphasizes the actions of a traditional crime boss

Culture|Television review

Crisis ★★★

Canada 2021

Netflix

by Nicholas Jarecki suspense drama Crisis (2021) starts in the snowy border region between Canada and the United States. The young man caught by the authorities was planning to transport a bag of fentanyl pills across the border.

The opioid crisis has plagued the United States for decades. According to the end credits of the film, more than 100,000 people die from opioid overdose every year.

Crisis looks at this world from three points of view.

The drug police are on the trail of criminal gangs, a mother who lost her son does her own investigations, and in the most interesting aspect, the ruthlessness of the pharmaceutical industry is proven.

Real life the crisis was created by a US billionaire businessman by Richard Sackler the company Purdue Pharma, which developed and aggressively marketed Oxycontin, was not a harmless painkiller after all. Unsuspecting users who received it from doctors ended up, in their surprising addiction and with the changes in supply, looking for a substitute for, among other things, heroin.

In the end, the company was ordered to pay six billion dollars in damages.

In the movie Crisis rushing to market the (fictional) painkiller Klalaron, but research doctor Tyrone Brower (Gary Oldman) has found it to be addictive.

Jake Kelly (Armie Hammer) is a drug agent infiltrating the core of criminal leagues, who also fights against his own sister’s drug problem.

Architect Claire Reimann (Evangeline Lilly) is a recovering addict whose 16-year-old athlete son dies after dealing with a pill business.

As far as Kelly and Reimann are concerned, the film follows the traditional operational patterns of crime thrillers, even accepting a law-breaking and morally-stretching final solution.

Brower’s conflict with his own professional ethics opens up as a more interesting theme. Keeping silent about research results would secure work and prosperity, while revealing problems threatens to destroy career and reputation.

The pharmaceutical industry greed is an inviting topic, after all, giant corporations that destroy people and nature have been among the bad guys of American entertainment culture for ages.

Still Crisis is quite alone with his subject area.

Family drama Return is one of the few films about the opioid crisis shown on Finnish free-to-air channels.

Mini-series dealing with the topic have been made more in the United States, such as Painkiller and noted for two Emmys Dopesickor documents such as The Crime of the Century and awarded All the Beauty and the Bloodshed.

These works represent the production of the very last few years, and some of them have been seen on streaming channels in Finland as well.

But such individual brand films as, for example, heroin addiction in the United States of the 50s (Golden arm), in 70s Germany (Christiane F. – the girl from the subway station) or in 90s Scotland (Train spotting) does not seem to have been created by the opioid crisis.

At least not yet.