The pretty English village of Lavenham in the Suffolk countryside is, I am sure, a charming home. Unnamed, it also makes an ominous setting for The Strays, the jagged horror debut of writer-director Nathaniel Martello-White. Tapping into the eerie hum of middle England, the movie plays out in a world of private-school runs and garden party charity fundraisers. And community pillar wife-and-mother Neve (Ashley Madekwe) seems a perfect fit.
Or she would, if we hadn’t briefly met her somewhere else — as someone else. Then the setting was scuffed inner London, and Neve was Cheryl: a woman in trouble and making a sudden exit. Years later, all has been transformed. Our anti-heroine is now a poised, moneyed figure juggling family, career and Poggenpohl-ish kitchen.
Some of the film’s impressive jitter is down to that secret history. Some is bound up with race. While Neve says she is “proudly” black, it doesn’t often seem like it, here in a place as primly monocultural as the small town in Jordan Peele’s Get Out.
Where that movie involved a nightmare conspiracy, though, The Strays hinges more on Neve’s fractured self. Yet Peele still proves a touchstone: less for Get Out than his brilliant second movie, Us. As it did there, domestic bliss is soon disrupted by unfriendly strangers who may not be strangers at all.
The execution of ideas here can be bumpy: sometimes you’d like more back-story, other scenes meander. But moments of social satire also land with real oomph. And Madekwe is terrific, bringing to life a woman forced to scratch the itch of her own flawless surfaces.
★★★☆☆
On Netflix now
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