Why is it that medium tier films that are British or French get a pass from me? I don’t know, but I tend to rank films like The Strays higher than I would if it were your average American concern. Yeah, it’s not a 4-star film, but the excellent cast and cool ending made me feel quite entertained by it.
We start with a working class woman who is unsatisfied and dreams of the finer things in life. We can hear her kids crying in the other room, while she tells her sister on the phone that she’s just about had enough of this life.
It’s important to mention that the woman (later to be known as “Neve”) is Black.
Flash forward to “some years later” and Neve has essentially shed as much of her “blackness,” if you will, as possible. She is now married to a nice man – a white man, and they have two beautiful bi-racial children.
Their suburban house is plush and she is the headmistress at a high school. There is an unspoken tension that plagues virtually every waking moment of what seems like a very charmed life for Neve. Although she never says outright that she is Black, she never wants it mentioned, not even by her kids.
At some point, she sees quick flashes of people that startle her – one passes by the window – another has started working at the school as a janitor.
In the final third, the film becomes the thriller it’s been promising to be from the start. The film does a 5 day flashback, introducing us to the people Neve has been seeing around every corner.
Who are they? What do they want? Are they victims or victimizers or a bit of both? The Strays has fun with these questions and even has a small bit of gore to nudge it partly into a horror-lite category.
The ending is going to be a groaner for some, but I loved its wordless exit stage left.
The cast are solid all around, but Ashley Madekwe is the center of the film’s universe and she is phenomenal. I kinda dug it.
The Strays is currently steaming on Netflix
