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

Jordan Peele take out is a brilliantly successful film that has put a comet-like tail on the art and business of cinema. While it has inspired many opportunistic imitators, it has inspired a generation of marginalized filmmakers, especially black filmmakers, to use thrillers and horror films as a vehicle for the themes most important to them. Equally important, it convinced studios and production companies that enabling filmmakers wasn’t the right thing to do, it was smart business.

This time last year, the Sundance Film Festival was blown away with stories like these. master and Nanny It went against their genre framework at times, but in an interesting way.Back in 2020, Netflix produced a Remi Weekes production. his houseone of the best British horror films of recent years, a chilling haunted house flick about a Sudanese asylum seeker clinging to the precarious and crumbling foothold provided in British life. It explores the experiences of people very specifically.

Netflix’s latest brit thriller, strays, initially feels like a similar prospect.If anything, it’s even closer take outit drops supernatural allegory and horror imagery in favor of something more psychologically realistic and more disturbing to the surface of society. , writer-director Nathaniel Martello-White is making his feature debut, but it doesn’t fare well, at least until the film’s final moments.

Played by Ashley Madekwe, Neve is a woman living a sophisticated life in an affluent part of the English countryside. There, big mid-century homes gracefully spread out among the trees, cute tea shops abound in town, and her life revolves around an expensive private education.It’s like the richer, less idealistic, eccentric version sex educationfantasy valley. Also, everyone in this world is white except for Neve and her two children.

Neave, the vice-principal of an upper-class school, is skilled but nervous. She continues to scratch the inky black wig she wears and doesn’t let anyone see her own natural hair, not even her husband. we know what this means. Martello-White in the prologue, years ago living in a poor apartment complex in London under the name Cheryl, walking out on her miserable life and having an abusive partner.

This prologue is one of several dull structural choices that suck all the tension out of the movie. Instead of feeling the way to Neve/Cheryl’s trauma, the film burns it in from the beginning. It’s not hard to figure out who they are, who they are, and what they mean.

Martello-White, in his choice of shots, gave these two “brooding figures” (a dubious word in the logline, not mine) a threatening, even if obtained, ill-fitting role in the drama. We strive to give it an air of mystery. The effect a character has is entirely up to the performer. Jorden Miley as a young man and Bucky Buckley as a woman. Miley simmers with masculine repressed anger, while Bakley excels in her 2020 heart-wrenching urban drama. rock —both modes have moving, innocent qualities that can suddenly shatter with shocking bitterness without seeming wrong.

The script is not only predictable, but unconvincingly crafts these characters as demons before rewinding the narrative with a twist that breaks the film’s moral coherence. The characterization may be meant to evoke how Neve sees them, but it’s villainous filmmaking and highly unconvincing. The way the genre works is how you can’t let go of this notion that Miley and Bakley are creepy house invaders who bring dark calculations. It’s too late — they’re forced to continue cosplaying as bad guys.

Photo: Chris Harris/Netflix

Martello White seems to want it strays Becoming a film about the fault lines of black identity and class divisions in Britain. is building. These are the questions that unerring sniper Peele targeted more vividly in his 2019s. we. Rebecca Hall honed the same idea with Laser Focus in Catastrophic Events 2021. passagealso streamed on Netflix.

But Martello-White, by contrast, cannot find a target. He can’t answer his own questions or explain why he turned a sad personal story into a psychological thriller. The film’s only salvation is the devastating simplicity of the ending when Cheryl/Neve puts these unmotivated matters into her hands in an unexpected and perfectly sensible way. Can you blame me?

strays Currently streaming on Netflix.