The sound design in the opening ten minutes of Danis Tanovic’s Tigers is irritatingly loud regarding the clink of glass bottles on a delivery truck. If I'm honest, it took me completely out of the groove while I was trying to figure out if the protagonist was supposed to look exhausted or just poorly lit.

Emraan Hashmi plays Ayan, a pharmaceutical salesman in Pakistan who peddles baby formula to doctors who should know better. We have seen Hashmi lean against walls and brood in a dozen other Hindi films, but here he drops the smirk that usually defines his screen persona and replaces it with a dead-eyed corporate anxiety that feels remarkably lived-in, especially when he is staring blankly at a row of hospital brochures that cost more than his monthly rent.

Tanovic directs with a kind of flat, television-grade urgency that keeps reminding you this was an international co-production cobbled together across borders and budgets without much room for visual flourish. The camera stays too close to actors’ faces during conversations that should feel expansive, creating a claustrophobia that feels less like a stylistic choice and more like a logistical constraint. Yet the narrative momentum carries you forward anyway because the sheer predatory nature of the multinational corporation buying up Ayan’s soul is terrifyingly mundane.

Khalid Abdalla shows up as a documentary filmmaker trying to help Ayan blow the whistle, and his performance has an academic stiffness that contrasts nicely with Hashmi’s sweating desperation. Abdalla doesn't get enough to do besides look concerned near windows and hold tape recorders, but he anchors the moral inquiry of the script without turning into a saint. The corporate heavies they are fighting against are never quite personified into cartoon villains, which makes their casual destruction of infant health in the developing world much harder to shake off once the credits roll.

Geetanjali Thapa plays Ayan’s wife, Zanaib, and she has to carry the emotional fallout of her husband’s crumbling conscience with very little dialogue. There's a scene in a cramped kitchen where she drops a container of baby powder that had me wincing because it hits every single note of domestic dread without feeling like an acting workshop exercise. Thapa manages to communicate total alienation from her own husband just by shifting her weight away from him on a narrow sofa, which is the kind of microscopic observation that saves a lot of heavy-handed exposition.

Most commercial Bollywood features would have turned this Nestlé scandal into a three-hour revenge saga with slow-motion punch-ups and a soaring patriotic anthem, but Tanovic keeps the scale aggressively small, almost suffocatingly so. You watch Ayan calculate his commission on boxes of milk substitute while mothers in slums dilute the powder because they cannot afford the proper dose, and the horror of the situation creeps up on you through ledgers and spreadsheets rather than explosive shootouts.

The cinematography by Alain Duplantier relies too heavily on washed-out blues and sickly fluorescent greens that make every interior look like a dentist’s waiting room, though it does capture the soul-crushing banality of office life in Karachi. That soundtrack keeps recycling the same three-note synth drone every time Ayan has a crisis of conscience, and it gets grating by the second hour. It's a small thing, but it bugged me every single time it kicked in.

The script, co-written by Tanovic and Andy Paterson, refuses to give Ayan a clean redemption arc or even a satisfying moment of righteous anger. He is an ordinary guy who wanted to buy a nicer car and send his family on holiday, and his stumble into whistleblowing is born out of self-preservation and bruised vanity rather than pure altruism. That lack of moral cleanliness is what keeps the film from sinking into standard issue social-issue drama territory, even when the pacing drags during the middle stretch where the legal wrangling gets bogged down in bureaucratic delays.

When you put this next to something like Steven Soderbergh’s Erin Brockovich, you notice how much less cinematic Tigers is, lacking the snappy dialogue and the glowing star wattage that makes corporate malfeasance look like fun. Yet Hashmi’s performance stays with you precisely because he never tries to make Ayan a hero, letting him remain a jittery, compromised salesman who just wants everyone to stop looking at him in restaurants.

There is no grand catharsis at the end of Tigers, just a quiet realization that the machine keeps running no matter how many whistleblowers lose their jobs or their marriages, and the film is brave enough to leave its characters sitting in the uncomfortable wreckage of their own choices without offering a tidy moral lesson to take home.