The Strays Review: Tries to Place Itself in the Wake of Social Thrillers

Form: Ashley Madekwe, Samuel Paul Klein, Maria Almeida, Bukky Bakray and Jorden Myrie

Director: Nathaniel Martello-White

Streaming platform:Netflix

Filmyhype.com Reviews: 3/5 (three stars)

Fimyhype Reviews

The strays, a lost person, a 1 hour 37 minute Netflix movie, a perfect life… A perfect lie… The life of an upper middle class woman begins to reveal the truth. With the arrival of two young blacks in her town. The social indictment of horror thriller is a subgenre of horror cinema that has always enjoyed great success with audiences and critics alike. The most illustrious and recent examples are the works of Jordan Peele: Out, Noand the more recent No. These three films explore how African Americans continue to be victims of various forms of racism, even by the more liberal segments of American society. As we will see in this review of The straysNathaniel Martello-White’s film follows in the footsteps of Peele (moving from the US to England), but looking for originality.

The result, in our opinion, lacks the insight of the previously mentioned works and is confused and off center; In fact, The strays fails to draw the public’s attention to the issues it seeks to denounce, getting lost in an approximate development and a low-impact finale. British Netflix drama thriller produced by black actor Nathaniel Martello-White, who went on to direct and write the first story with the moody tone of the mystery black people genre. It makes me think that this actor may have been inspired by Jordan Peele. The famous director of Out also comes from the same actors. and came to handle the directing well, writing a script that tells the story of his movie in the realm of a thriller that still has a lot to tell.

The Strays Review: The story plot

The protagonist of this story is Cheryl (Ashley Madekwe), a black woman who is dissatisfied with her life and decides – as we see in the prologue – to leave everything and everyone behind to start over. We find her again some twenty years later, the mother of a family – calling themselves Snow – in a well-to-do suburb, in the middle of the social life of a community where they are all white and wealthy. When her day-to-day life is perfect—between breakfasts with friends, the job of vice principal of a prestigious private school, and organizing a charity gala—the memory of what she left seems to resurface unsettlingly. When an unknown black man and a girl arrive in the neighborhood and approach both of his children – Sebastian (Samuel Paul Small) and Mary (Maria Almeida) – things begin to go downhill for Neve, amid disturbing visions that threaten even his sanity. seem to bring.

The plot is divided into 4 chapters, alternating from the corners of the main characters. Starting with Nef (actress Ashley Madekwe), a black mom who changed herself to look like a white guy with a good job. She started seeing two black men and women hanging out in a town near her family. In this city, only she was black before. The film shows her beginning to suffer from various symptoms of itchy head scratching. Easy loss of consciousness, making the public very suspicious all the time. The film tells the first half hour of Neff’s chapter. before revealing the important secrets of the story and then moving on to chapter 2. It is another angle of the story of two black brothers that Neff saw. And the audience gets to see another side of the story in the first chapter. What did Neff see and what did he think was the truth? Before going back to Neff’s story again by telling the whole story so that we can understand and reveal Neff’s true identity. Therefore, the climax of the story is a quiet, terrifying house thriller without loud, without blood. But it gives an exciting feeling that something bad is about to happen.

The Strays Review and Analysis

As we expected at the outset, Martello-White’s work is decidedly less focused when comparing the thrillers/horror of Peele’s brilliant filmography. What the author wants to communicate to us is – at first – very clear, but then the effectiveness of his message becomes watered down and is definitely lost in the closing sequence. At the center of the film, we see a woman trying to erase her identity as a black woman and make a life for herself in an all-white community where she is accepted. However, the digs about her skin color and being different from her are continuous (“you’re practically one of us,” a friend says at one point), and seem to be the trigger for the chaos that slowly breaks into her life. . A particularly fitting image, in our opinion, is the one evoked by the relationship between Neve and her hair: in fact, the woman hides her natural hair with a series of wigs, which, however, begin to cause itching and discomfort.

As if her identity as a black woman, and with her the past she’s trying to bury, is trying to come back to the surface from this part of her body that’s so fundamental to one’s identity. The arrival of the two “invaders” (Bukky Bakray and Jorden Myrie) “ruined” a message that seemed so neatly prepared for the viewer; as the story unfolds, what the film would like to communicate loses power. Above all, the enofng shifts the focus from social criticism to the reality of the main character. In the closing sequence, it wouldn’t have made a difference whether Cheryl/Neve had been Black, White, Asian, or Latina. As a result, the work involuntarily erases its identity, from an indictment film to a thriller.

Focusing specifically on the ending, therefore, we can only note how the attempt to make it shocking – which it succeeded in part – ends up transforming it into something decidedly more poignant than what it could have been, making, as we have already said, said, the focus of the story shifts. the story from universal (of the plight of black victims of discrimination) to personal (a woman who is prepared for anything out of sheer selfishness). Even the main character’s moments of mental confusion – the disturbing visions that momentarily haunt her – completely lose their meaning and usefulness from the point of view of the ending, making everything even less convincing.

It’s a shame, because the protagonists – especially Ashley Madekwe and the young Samuel Paul Small and Maria Almeida, who play his two children Sebastian and Maria – impressed us with the validity of their interpretations. Above all, Madekwe gives life to a deeply ambiguous character, capable of moving from fierce maternal love to boundless selfishness, which will really surprise the viewer. Perhaps less successful are the two ‘outsiders’ of this story, Bukky Bakray and Jorden Myrie in the role of Abigail and Marvin: these two characters are at times unjustly over the top, overly crazy without any real explanation (if not vague hints) from a traumatic past) about why they act the way they do.

It is considered a movie where many things are done quite well, including the plot, the script and the way the story is told. Solve the problem of blacks and whites with actors who play well. light thriller scenes gradation to heavy More busy than a straightforward horror scene. But came back to fall off the horse to die breaking the ending for the whole story to quite disappointing but it’s still interesting towards the work of a new black director who seems to be trying to follow in the footsteps to act by Jordan Peele.

The Strays Review: The last words

The strays tries to place itself in the wake of social thrillers, a subgenre that has enjoyed great success in recent years. It’s a shame that the message it wants to convey isn’t so sharp that it doesn’t hit the viewer as hoped. It is considered a movie where many things are done quite well, including the plot, the script and the way the story is told. Solve the problem of blacks and whites with actors who play well. light thriller scenes gradation to heavy More busy than a straightforward horror scene. But came back to fall off the horse to die, breaking the ending for the whole story to quite disappointing. But it’s still interesting towards the work of a new black director who seems to be trying to follow in Jordan Peele’s footsteps.