The Strays

The new Netflix thriller is the directorial debut of actor and playwright Nathaniel Martello-White.

[Netflix](https://www.netflix.com/gb/title/81444812). [subscribe now](http://radiotimes.com/magazine-subscription?utm_term=evergreen-article). [Sign up for Netflix from £6.99 a month](https://www.netflix.com/gb/). But also, from a technical aspect, the difference is that not only are you actually basically performing a mini-play, but you then are really aware of the fact that there's a camera, sound, and all that in there, too." And it was so helpful because it meant that when it came to those shooting days, it was almost a fine-oiled machine." It is made clear that Cheryl is their mother and abandoned them to start a new life when they were young. [Film](https://www.radiotimes.com/movies/) hub or check out our [TV Guide](https://www.radiotimes.com/tv/tv-listings/) and [Streaming Guide](https://www.radiotimes.com/streaming-guide/). Meanwhile, when they reveal that Neve had offered to pay them off, her husband Ian is furious – even demanding a divorce. Myrie added: "The type of scene that we were shooting as well is everything coming to the crescendo of the film. "It was a very long scene – it's almost 20 minutes that scene," Madekwe explained. So you have to be prepared. [terms and conditions](https://www.immediate.co.uk/terms-and-conditions/) and [privacy policy](https://policies.immediate.co.uk/privacy/).

A new Netflix film has just dropped, called The Strays, and writer and director Nathaniel Martello-White has explained how he based the film on a true ...

He was taking part in the BFI Network (a program that supports new and emerging filmmakers) as part of the London Film Festival and recalls being asked repeatedly about what his first feature film should be. And I was just really struck by the kind of complexities of that, like, what would make somebody feel like they had to erase their past and deny it?" "[She also] had two children, who were very fair-skinned and almost white-passing, and this woman was biracial.

The Strays has arrived on Netflix, and the new thriller builds to a shocking and dark finale, so let's delve into what happened and why.

Talking to Digital Spy, Madekwe revealed that the prologue and callback weren't in the original script. While this is happening, dinner arrives and Neve answers the door to the delivery driver. They tell her that even though she thinks she left them in the care of her sister, she didn't want them and "gave us away". In the build-up, Neve starts to suspect that she's being stalked by a young Black man, who she later sees working as a caretaker at her school, and a young Black woman. It's Dione's birthday and they want the whole extended family to celebrate together with a Chinese takeaway. She's working as the deputy head of the local private school and arranging a charity gala in a few days' time.

First-time writer-director Nathaniel Martello-White tries for a racial-tension thriller in the vein of His House, Master, or Jordan Peele's Us, but until ...

He builds the story around the question of why and how someone would remake their life in a different image, and what it costs to do so. Martello-White seems to want The Strays to be a film about the fault lines in British Black identity, and in class divisions, too. The effect the characters do have is entirely down to the performers: Jorden Myrie as the young man, and Bukky Bakray as the woman. If anything, it hews even closer to Get Out, as it drops the supernatural allegory and horror imagery in favor of something more psychologically real, more disturbingly close to the surface of society. [brilliant, successful movie](https://www.polygon.com/2017/2/28/14762250/get-out-key-peele) that left a comet-like tail blazing across the art and business of film. Back in 2020, Netflix produced Remi Weekes’ [His House](https://www.polygon.com/2020/10/30/21542815/his-house-review-netflix-horror-movie), one of the best British horror films of recent years, a chilling haunted-house movie that explores, with great specificity, the experience of Sudanese asylum-seekers clinging to the precarious, crumbling foothold they’ve been offered in British life.

Written and directed by Nathaniel Martello-White, "The Strays" tells the story of a woman whose sensibilities were so absurd and erratic that even her ...

That’s when Ian, Mary, and Sebastian discovered that Neve was just an alias Cheryl had used to hide her tracks and that she had offered her own children money to leave her and return to where they had come from. She was a disgrace and Carl knew that she was only apologizing so that she could make them go away and then return to her perfect and posh life. We believe there was absolutely nothing wrong with her ex-husband Michael, and she was only making all of it up to make her family sympathetic towards her situation. Cheryl told them that Michael, to whom she was married, was a bad man, and he had forced her to have a second baby. Cheryl was an extremely racist person who thought that people of color polluted her environment and that the two worlds should never mix. Cheryl had offered a whooping sum to Carl and Dione, and she believed that she could win them over and make them go back to London. Cheryl wanted to handle the situation and do some damage control, but contrary to that, she went and did something that worsened the situation. There was an air of mystery around her intentions, but it still couldn’t be perceived to what extent she was ready to go to get to that aspirational financial and social status. Cheryl completely revamped her identity and took the alias “Neve.” She married a white man named Ian and had two children named Sebastian and Mary. Cheryl had a literal panic attack, and her sister on the other end of the phone was constantly telling her to breathe and calm down for a moment. On the face of it, she was the most polite and well-mannered person one could ever meet, but hidden underneath that exterior was a racist and treacherous person who could betray even those people who meant the world to her. We come to know that Cheryl had a problem with the way society treated them, and through their condescending behavior, thought of them as no more than reprobates.

Confused by The Strays on Netflix? Read Decider's analysis of The Strays plot summary and The Strays ending explained, for the new Netflix horror movie.

Neve retrieves her purse and tells Dionne, Sebastian, and Mary that she will be right back and they will work everything out after she tips the delivery driver. Which is to say: a selfish jerk and a very bad mother! It’s not clear what will happen to the kids, but it is clear that Cheryl is the same person she has always been. Ian is groaning in pain, and his arms shake as he struggles to hold the weights above his chest. Dionne and Carl break into Neve’s house in the middle of the night. Though she never hides her race as a light-skinned Black woman, she essentially begins to “pass” as an upper-class white woman in her new life and seems uncomfortable with Black culture. Dionne and Carl loudly make themselves at home, and the noise wakes up the family. Both Carl and Dionne befriend their half-siblings—Carl cheers on Sebastian at his basketball game, and Dionne gives Mary a makeover in her hotel room. As she leaves the house, her husband Michael leaves an angry voice message for her on the phone. She leaves a note on the fridge saying she’s going to the hairdresser. If you’re curious about The Strays, or got confused by the ending, then read on for Decider’s breakdown of The Strays plot and The Strays ending explained. (And no, [The Strays is not the R-rated Will Ferrell comedy](https://decider.com/2023/02/22/the-strays-netflix-vs-will-ferrell-movie/) about talking dogs.

Ominous. It's a key vibe here. Also portentous and foreboding. You know, like something's going to break.

It’s not as funny or unsettling as it needs to be, with a predictable end-of-act-one twist and a conclusion that’s surprising in its logic, but isn’t precluded by the nerve-wracking buildup of suspense it needs to pack a serious wallop. In that opening sequence, she asks if it’s wrong to want more, and now that she’s got more, what does it mean, what did she have to do to attain it, and was it worth the effort and apparent sacrifice? She’s out for tea with an associate and sees a man in a red cap (Jorden Myrie) in the background, and she’s unsettled. Her cell phone rings and she doesn’t answer it and then the landline rings and she doesn’t answer that either. She seems to be developing quite a (scratch scratch scratch) (damn wig) tic. He amps up the ominousness with a cliched musical score, stalker-in-the-periphery visual cat-and-mouse games, and the usual gaslighting of the protagonist. The film almost timidly skirts the edge of satire, as if it wants to slash racial tropes and dynamics to ribbons, but didn’t sharpen its claws enough. Martello-White’s intent and ambition is notable, but his hand is heavy. She pops a prescription pill, which isn’t a big deal at all, lots of people take prescription pills every day, but this is a movie and it makes a point of the shake from the bottle and the – glunk – swallow. It’s either Cheryl/Neve’s sanity, or a flimsy secret about to be traumatically Humpty-Dumptied – a secret hinted at in the film’s opening sequence. Neve is married to a nice enough Caucasian fellow, Ian (Justin Salinger), and they have two teenagers, Sebastian (Samuel Small) and Mary (Maria Almeida). Whether The Strays has something to say about vital issues of the day remains to be seen, but one thing that’s certain is, this affluent woman Got Out but ended up very deep into something else entirely.

Ashley Madekwe in a still from The Strays. A suburban horror that offers a salacious peek into the secretive lives of the almost-wealthy, a social thriller that ...

In fact, presenting them — the only two overtly Black characters in sight — as the violent ‘villains’, especially when the movie itself wants us to believe that they’re the ones who’ve been wronged, is dicey optics at best, and self-defeating at worst. It is suggested, strongly, that Neve has never really been able to connect with her children, seeing in their mixed-race appearances hints of the past that she has worked so hard to bury. Neve’s husband recoils in shock at the sight of her pummelling their son, which is when he begins to recognise that something is seriously wrong with her. But things begin to spiral out of control when two strangers begin showing up at random times in Neve’s life, and begin to methodically pull at the seams of her perfectly crafted fake existence. She refuses to take it off even at home, as if her Blackness is a crime waiting to be discovered. Presumably presented with several options — she could have chosen to become anybody, really — she decided to transform herself into a sort of person that society had conditioned her into believing is superior.

Last year's Sundance Film Festival had a range of movies that followed in Get Out's footsteps, like Master and Nanny, often employed genre frameworks in ...

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We see Neve explain to her new family why she had to leave the children behind when she fled from their abusive father. the ending of the strays on netflix ...

With a piece like this, you can kind of look at it and think: 'Okay, how can we enhance this?' and I think showing a bit of the backstory is one of those things," she explained. We then jump forward a number of years to find Cheryl – now going by the name Neve – and living a completely different life. In what soon becomes an incredibly tense situation, Carl and Dione insist on celebrating Dione’s birthday with the whole extended family by playing a board game and ordering a Chinese takeaway. Her oldest daughter assumes that Neve will let them stay with her new new family, however, their mother attempts to make things right by giving her two oldest children – Carl and Dione – £20,000. [Netflix](https://www.cosmopolitan.com/uk/entertainment/g12450465/netflix-best-new-films-tv-shows-documentaries/) and it has quite the ending! The movie begins with Cheryl – played by Ashley Madekwe – who is living a rather miserable life in London, packing up and deciding to leave her life behind.

The psychological horror thriller had us gripped the whole way through. But you may have some unersolved questions. Here's The Strays ending explained.

Netflix The Strays' Ashley Madekwe: “There's a lot of pressure for women to be defined by motherhood”. The actor talks race, afro hair and thrillers.

But I think that there’s been a shift in that people are more open to having the conversation and there are more people of colour working in those departments, which is really important. And we’re told what hair is professional and what hair is is considered groomed and what hair is considered beautiful. The Silence Of The Lambs is one of my favourite horror films. It seemed like a commentary on the ways that hair is politicised. I think the past is the monster for Neve, the entities she’s seeing in the first act are the monsters. And nobody makes what I think is a sound choice in the film. There’s a line where Neve says, “I did what fathers do all the time.” And I think it’s interesting because we do look at it differently when men leave behind a family. [Horrors](https://www.stylist.co.uk/tag/Horror) – which is one of many genres this film sits in – typically have a monster at the heart. I think that there’s a lot of pressure for women to be defined by motherhood: that the most important thing a woman can do is have a baby. I think the monster changes depending on the act and perspective. Also starring Bukky Bakray (Rocks) and Jorden Myrie, this is a powerful debut film from writer-director Nathaniel Martello-White about the inescapable scars differences of class and Ashley Madekwe (County Lines, Secret Diary Of A Call Girl, Revenge) stars as Neve, who abandons a difficult life in east London for an almost idyllic life in the suburbs as a mum, wife and deputy headteacher – “You’re practically one of us,” says one of the mums from school.

Nathaniel Martello-White's feature debut The Strays is a social thriller that lacks bite, discipline, and a third act. When the film abruptly ended, I.

The Strays might come from a place of impossible angst about everything from assimilation to self-hatred, but concludes with all the grace of an Irish exit on St. Neve’s behavioral commentary on “passing,” class mobility, and serving yourself over others provides a situation ripe for social investigation, but Martello-White’s third act tosses kerosene on expanding themes and dares the audience to figure it all out. A film built on obvious secrets divides itself into three acts, the first two of which — one about “Current Neve,” the second about Marvin and Abigail — are expositional to a sluggish fault. The introduction of Marvin (Jorden Myrie) and Abigail (Bukky Bakray) is so emotionally weighted, only to abandon character development in favor of a third-act horror bend. Martello-White toys with haunted visions and break-in foreshadowing with minimal degrees of intensity in an attempt to hone on Neve’s house of cards tumbling down at the slightest gust. Ashley Madekwe leads as a complicated housewife everyone knows as Neve, a light-skinned Black woman who embraces wigs, makeup applications, and the comforts of white suburbia.