The Strays review: Netflix fumbles a new try at Get Out

Jordan Peele’s Move OutIt is an incredibly successful film that has left a trail of light across both the business and art of film. It’s inspired plenty of opportunistic copycats — but it’s also inspired a generation of marginalized filmmakers, especially Black filmmakers, to use thrillers and horror movies as vehicles for the themes that matter most to them. Just as important: It persuaded studios and production companies that enabling those filmmakers isn’t just the right thing to do, it’s smart business.

Sundance Film Festival received a flood of these stories this year. Master NannyThey sometimes rebelled against the genre structures they were created, but did so in fascinating ways. Back in 2020, Netflix produced Remi Weekes’ His House, one of the best British horror films of recent years, a chilling haunted-house movie that explores, with great specificity, the experience of Sudanese asylum-seekers clinging to the precarious, crumbling foothold they’ve been offered in British life.

Netflix’s latest Brit thriller, StraysIt initially seems like an identical prospect. It is closer than that. Move OutThe movie drops supernatural imagery and allegory, in favor of something that is more humane, disturbingly closer to society’s surface. But that’s even more difficult to execute tonally — and writer-director Nathaniel Martello-White, making his feature debut, doesn’t pull it off — at least, not until the movie’s final moments.

Ashley Madekwe is Neve. Neve lives in polished rural England where she has large, tasteful homes that are built between the trees. The towns also have cute tea shops and her life revolves around private schooling. It’s like a more monied, less idealistic and quirky version of Sexual Education’s fantasy valley. Except for Neve and her 2 children, every person in the world is white.

Neve, who is also the assistant head teacher at a high school, can be snarky but she’s a skilled and accomplished educator. She keeps scratching at the immaculate straight black wigs she wears, and won’t show anyone her natural hair, even her husband. It is obvious what it means. We would probably know what it meant even if Martello-White hadn’t, in a prologue, shown us the same character living many years earlier on a poor London housing estate, going by the name Cheryl, and walking out on her miserable life and abusive partner.

The film’s prologue is just one example of the many obtuse structural decisions that drain all tension. Instead of feeling its way toward Neve/Cheryl’s trauma, the film bakes it in from the start. Consequently, when a young Black man and woman show up and begin to disturb Neve’s idyllic existence, it isn’t hard to figure out where they’re from, who they might be, and what they signify.

A young Black man (Jorden Myrie) in a fluffy white bathrobe sits in a plush red chair in a dark, curtained room and stares directly at the camera in a scene from Netflix’s The Strays

With his shot choices, Martello-White labors to give these two “shadowy figures” (the logline’s questionable words, not mine) a menacing air of mystery that’s neither earned nor appropriate to the role they do play in the drama. Jorden Myrie plays the young man and Bukky Bakray the female. The actors have a huge impact on the characters. Myrie simmers with masculine repressed rage, while Bakray — who was so good in 2020’s heartbreaking inner-city drama Rocks — has a touching, innocent quality that she can suddenly shatter with shocking bitterness, without either mode seeming false.

The script unconvincingly makes these characters out as demons before rewinding to tell their story in a twist that’s not only easy to predict, but that breaks the film’s moral consistency. Their initial characterization as a threat may be intended to evoke how Neve sees them, but it’s bad-faith filmmaking, and deeply unconvincing. More bizarre still is the way the genre mechanics of the film can’t let go of this conception of Myrie and Bakray as creepy home invaders bringing a dark reckoning, even after we’ve learned their much simpler and sadder truth. It’s too late — they’re forced to keep cosplaying as the bad guys.

A young Black woman in a bright yellow dress stands in a crowd of people outdoors at what appears to be a garden party and yells at them in a scene from Netflix’s The Strays

Martello White seems to have a problem StraysIt is a movie about British Black identity and class divisions. His story centers on the questions of how and why people would change their lives, as well as the cost. These are questions that Peele, an unerring sharpshooter, targeted more vividly in 2019’s Us. Rebecca Hall honed in on the same ideas with a laser focus in 2021’s devastating PassingAlso available on Netflix.

But by contrast, Martello-White can’t locate his target. He can’t answer his own questions, or explain why he’s turned a sad personal story into a psychological thriller. He makes his characters fall. The film’s one saving grace is the devastating simplicity of its ending, when Cheryl/Neve takes these motiveless matters into her hands in a way that’s both unexpected and makes perfect sense. She could not be blamed.

StraysYou can stream Netflix right now