There’s a heavy-handed ominousness from the first frame of The Strays, Netflix’s new entry into the stuffed category of social horror. Dissonant music plays over a concrete block apartment building in London, in which Cheryl (Ashley Madekwe), a light-skinned Black woman, appears in distress. There are bank statements crumpled on the counter, a headline blaring “Black kids betrayed by schools”, a mention of credit card debt in a phone call to her sister, a voice-cracking lament of wanting more. It’s the mid-2000s, and someone keeps calling Cheryl on her old brick phone before she walks out the door with a duffel bag and note about popping to the hairdresser, presumably on the run.
It’s an unsettling, propulsive start that provokes several promising questions – where is she going? Why is she leaving? Who is the sinister voice on the answering machine? All the baselines of a thriller. Some get answered, but most do not, in any satisfying or specific way. British actor and writer Nathaniel Martello-White’s directorial debut nudges at some uncomfortable fault lines of race and class, but tends to over-index unearned suspense for character development or insight.
