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.

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.

The Strays, starring Ashley Madekwe and Bukky Bakray, is out now on Netflix and it's a must-watch thriller with an unforgettable finale.

For some, The Strays might end a bit too abruptly and its supporting cast isn't fleshed out as its leading trio. Your allegiances will switch throughout and by the end, you still won't know who is in the right – if anybody is. [Barbarian](https://www.digitalspy.com/movies/a41736283/barbarian-review-uk-release/) did last year, the section ends with an explosive revelation and before we have time to settle on that, the movie switches gear to a more coming-of-age feel in the second section. When Neve starts to suspect that two shadowy figures (Jorden Myrie and Bukky Bakray) are stalking her, the truth starts to come out and Neve's life is changed forever. She's the deputy head at the local private school and is planning a charity gala, as you do. It marked an auspicious start to Netflix's new crop of UK movies, and [The Strays](https://www.digitalspy.com/movies/trailers/a42669050/the-strays-trailer-netflix-release-date/) delivers on that promise.

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 ...

[](https://nnn.ng/#:~:text=best blogger outreach companies) [](https://nnn.ng/hausa/#=naijanewshausa) [](https://nnn.ng/i/#=html shortner) [Foreign](https://nnn.ng/foreign/)

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.