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The film’s biggest problem is that Liza’s success seems unconnected to the deadly product she sells until very near the end. David Yates, who directed the last four Harry Potter movies and its Fantastic Beasts prequels, knows how to create a fluent narrative even here. But it’s as if he and the screenwriter, Wells Tower, were too timid to go all in on being entertaining about such an important subject, but too worried about being a downer to weave the dark side of the story through convincingly. That is a tricky balancing act, as demonstrated by Painkiller, which went so far the other way it bludgeoned viewers with the obvious.

In Pain Hustlers, one patient says in a quick word to the camera that Lonafen “gave me back my life for a minute”, but it’s left to us to recognise that minute is the point, even after we later see two of his teeth fall out in his hand. Instead, the story focuses on Liza and Zanna’s rise, the tone echoing their euphoria as the company soars from near-bankruptcy to the top of the market. Catherine O’Hara has brief but lively scenes as Liza’s wild-child mother, and Brian d’Arcy James plays a venal doctor who is also a buffoon. When the film turns more serious and leans into its moral issue, the shift registers as viewer whiplash.

And as much as Blunt gives her life, Liza is finally too artificial a construction, made to appeal to us as the best version of the pain hustler she is. Her daughter desperately needs medical care that insurance won’t cover, a blatant device to justify her choice to keep working for Zanna even after her conscience begins to kick in.

With the final credits we see real-life news reports about the inspiration for Garcia’s character, Dr John Kapoor, who was convicted of bribery. By then Pain Hustlers has veered too far into fantasyland for anything real to matter.

★★☆☆☆

Pain Hustlers is released in select US cinemas on 20 October and on Netflix internationally on 27 October.

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When she becomes accredited as a journalist by the US military, the film truly comes to match the importance of her work, and gives us the measure of its emotional psychological cost. She goes to Normandy, and faces fire during a battle in St Malo, France (that opening scene). Davey joins her as they cover the war across Europe. “We drove for months, didn’t wash for weeks,” we hear the older Miller say as we see them in a jeep driving through dusty streets. After Paris is liberated, she finds her way amidst crumbling buildings to visit Solange, and in one of the film’s most wrenching scenes, learns how horrific the war has been even for those who survived.

Winslet let us see the toll that knowledge takes, as Miller forces herself to look at and document the most unbearable scenes. When the war ends, she and Davey enter Germany and go to Dachau. We do not see what Miller does when she enters one room, but in the interviewer’s hand we see the photograph she took that day, of piles of corpses. Kuras modulates all this in a style that smoothly takes us into Miller’s experience and unique point of view, but with an eloquent understatement.

The war scenes speak loudly on their own, with no need to add dramatic emphasis. Alexandre Desplat’s score matches that style, with a subtle, piercing beauty. If the first half of Lee had been as dazzlingly effective as the second, it might have been a great film instead of a very good one.

Penrose’s biography includes a letter she wrote about her difficulty crossing the border into Hungary in 1945, when Russian guards pointed guns at her. “The adventures were good cinema,” she said. In the end, they certainly were.

★★★★☆

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