The Strays Review – A New Failed Get Out Scenario?

The Strays, a feature debut of Nathaniel Martello-White, is a tale of a Black woman Neve Williams, who resides in a white neighbourhood and works in a dominantly-white private school. With menacing undertones, her past is suddenly catching up to her psychologically.

The film opens with a little segment of her past, clearly distressed about her living situation in London. Excessively spending the money, dissatisfaction in her life will never get better. Turning to capitalism as a stylistic element of modern horror sets the tone of what the film’s climax will offer. She packs her bags and leaves the house, signalling she might be escaping from the dire situation she was stuck in.

Now decades later, living in a perfect neighbourhood and having a perfect life starts to feel sinister when her neighbour tells “you’re practically one of us”. That right there is enough to set the fire alarms; she’s “practically” not one of them as we had an earlier peek into her past. Now a middle-class light-skinned Black woman, she’s not proud to be in her skin, which reminds of her who she actually is.

Her mentality starts deteriorating over time, even though she pushes herself to the edge of sanity in order to keep this constructed-fake life. The subconscious nightmare-induced visuals of Black people keep appearing at the corner of her eye, causing her to be either violent or get into unwanted accidents. Recurring itches under her wig get the attention of the camera while her teenage daughter embraces her naturally curly hair, baby hairs and braids. Soon later, Neve’s previous life as Cheryl violently bursts her bubble at the gala party she has been looking up to.

This on the surface provides an experience of a Black woman trying to run away from her troubled messy life in order to fit into a white-dominated posh society. Seemingly, it feels like we have travelled back in time to the 1950s gender and racial roles. However, reality keeps revealing its undesirable head at the most inconvenient times. For escapist Neve, the perfect life is absent until she rid herself of internalised racism, self-contempt, and desiring fictitious societal expectations. Her partner before is revealed to be an abusive man, which makes her impulsive escape a valid one. However, her desire to have this idealistic perfect life that doesn’t even exist creates even worse chaos in her future life.

What the film fails at are its mainstream, full-of-horror-cliches, and glamorised film elements. The ending becomes pretty predictable in the first quarter section of the narration. At that point, there is not much left to wonder or worry about. The children from her previous life and London are not even explored other than London is where real life occurs and her children are now traumatized mentally insane kids out-to-get-you horror characters. In a way, unlike Jordan Peele’s Get Out this film escapes reality into a spiral full of deceit and manipulation. And in the end, the children became The Strays. The vicious cycle of self-hatred and yearning for unattainable capitalist desires perpetually continues; no lessons are learned.