Isabelle Huppert in La Syndicaliste (Kino Lorber)

Whistleblower dramas have been a cinematic staple for decades, from Serpico and Silkwood to The Insider and Dark Waters. There’s something inherently dramatic and even bracing about rooting for an ordinary person going up against a faceless behemoth, like a corporation or government, and fighting the good fight to bring them down.

Jean-Paul Salomé’s film is based on the true story of Maureen Kearney, who was the union representative at the giant French nuclear firm Areva, which, she discovered, was working on backroom deals with the Chinese government. In 2012, Maureen begins calling out Areva’s new head, Luc Oursel. The company’s previous president, Anne Lauvergeon (Marina Foïs), was a good friend and worked well together with Maureen, unlike Maureen’s fractious relationship with Oursel, who never warmed to her no-nonsense, even strident style. The friction between her and those in charge is such that Maureen’s housecleaner finds her in the basement of her home tied to a chair and gagged, after having been brutally sexually assaulted. The suspicion immediately falls on Oursel and his cronies.

Salomé begins the film there, then moves back and forth chronologically to fill out the story of what this brave woman and her family went through after she dared to become a truthteller. Based on the eponymous 2019 book by Caroline Michel-Aguirre, La Syndicaliste—literally translated as The Trade Unionist but known as The Sitting Duck in some English-language territories—is most effective when dramatizing Maureen’s increasingly fraught dealings with her work colleagues.

Isabelle Huppert gives another of her nuanced portrayals as Maureen, natural and at ease as she talks to Hungarian women plant workers in danger of being considered redundant, discussing business with Lauvergeon, or interacting with her husband and their daughter. However, once the tension ratchets up as Maureen is threatened professionally and personally, La Syndicaliste becomes arch and unconvincing, turning Oursel into a one-dimensional villain who huffs and puffs and throws a chair at Maureen in one boardroom scene. Not even the capable Yvan Attal can give Oursel the needed complexity.

The sequences detailing Maureen’s dealings with the police are marred by the actors playing the skeptical detectives as stereotypically single-minded oafs. They first believe her story of a break-in and the assault, but soon harp on inconsistencies (most likely egged on by those who want to silence her) that force her to admit to fabricating the entire incident. Everything that has been dramatized may have happened, and those involved may have acted precisely as we see them, but as Salomé depicts it all, it comes off as melodramatic and implausible, especially since there’s so much going on that it can’t hope to be crammed into a two-hour film. The subject matter begs for a streaming miniseries to sort out the complexities.

Maureen’s story has also been flattened out somewhat by having Huppert play her. As impressive as she is, Huppert is French, not Irish; she’s not a very credible teacher of English to French students (like the real Kearney), but the authenticity of Maureen’s Irishness is necessary to add a layer of xenophobia to the sexism and misogyny already present in her story. This crucial element is missing from La Syndicaliste, which ends up as an efficient but otherwise less than compelling addition to the whistleblower canon.