The Strays

Living beyond her means and long­ing for bet­ter than her Lon­don hous­ing estate can offer, Cheryl (Ash­ley Madek­we) is defined by dis­sat­is­fac­tion – and so she packs up and walks out, ignor­ing the increas­ing­ly angry phone mes­sages from hus­band Michael, and leav­ing a note on the fridge (“just pop­ping to the hairdresser’s”) that is already clear­ly a lie. 

The extent of Cheryl’s escapist men­tal­i­ty and deter­mined adapt­abil­i­ty at the begin­ning of writer/​director Nathaniel Martello-White’s fea­ture debut The Strays is revealed when, some years lat­er, we find her liv­ing in a leafy, upper mid­dle class Wilt­shire vil­lage. Despite a lack of sup­port­ing ref­er­ences, she has become deputy head at an exclu­sive pri­vate school, and is about to put on her first char­i­ty gala in the lux­u­ri­ous­ly appoint­ed home that she shares with lov­ing hus­band Ian (Justin Salinger) and their teenage chil­dren Sebas­t­ian (Samuel Small) and Mary (Maria Almeida). 

“You’re prac­ti­cal­ly one of us,” she is reas­sured by local lady-who-lunch­es Aman­da (Lucy Lie­mann). Yet that mod­i­fi­er ​‘prac­ti­cal­ly’ is telling. For try as she might with her posh accent, her bour­geois pos­tur­ing and her wigged hair, one thing will always pre­vent her – and her chil­dren – from ever inte­grat­ing com­plete­ly into the com­mu­ni­ty, no mat­ter how accom­mo­dat­ing and accept­ing the likes of Aman­da may be. Cheryl has tried every­thing to dis­guise her back­ground, and in this rad­i­cal repres­sion of her own his­to­ry, has even changed her name to Neve – lit­er­al­ly ​‘snow’, a word reveal­ing­ly asso­ci­at­ed with both melt­ing tran­sience and white­ness. What Cheryl can­not con­ceal is the colour of her skin, instant­ly mark­ing her as alien in this all-white village. 

How­ev­er des­per­ate Cheryl is to fit into her adopt­ed neigh­bour­hood, the repressed keeps return­ing: in the night­mares that haunt Cheryl’s sub­con­scious; in the irri­ta­tion that her straight-haired wigs increas­ing­ly cause her scalp (a lit­er­alised itch that can­not be scratched); or in the corn­rows, iden­ti­fied a lit­tle too quick­ly by Amanda’s hus­band Bar­ry (Tom Andrews) as ​‘eth­nic’, which Mary starts sporting. 

For even as Cheryl eschews her ori­gins, her own mixed-race chil­dren are becom­ing inter­est­ed in explor­ing the roots of their oth­er­ness. Mean­while, the past that Cheryl believes she has final­ly left behind is about to appear in her rearview mir­ror, as two young black strangers (Jor­den Myrie, Bukky Bakray) will mate­ri­alise like venge­ful ghosts, and insin­u­ate them­selves on the periph­ery of Cheryl’s oth­er­wise cosy out­look, before com­ing clos­er to home. Their insis­tent pres­ence trig­gers all Cheryl’s guilt and anx­i­ety over who she real­ly is, what she has sac­ri­ficed, and how eas­i­ly she might be found out, even as it becomes ever clear­er that Cheryl is not the only elu­sive impos­tor in The Strays. 

“It hasn’t been a straight­for­ward jour­ney,” Cheryl will lat­er say of her own pecu­liar, upward­ly mobile flight from her­self and her own. Her words might also describe the twisty, chrono­log­i­cal­ly crooked nar­ra­tive that makes up The Strays, which begins as a psy­cho­log­i­cal study of per­son­al iden­ti­ty and the rav­aging after-effects of trans­for­ma­tion, but is also a Mike Leigh-style social dra­ma, com­plete with Cheryl’s secrets & lies cul­mi­nat­ing in home truths at Abigail’s par­ty. More sur­pris­es will fol­low, as an unnerv­ing, chill­ing clash of cul­tures plays out as much with­in as between Cheryl and her kin. As ten­sions mount in the domes­tic sphere, and all the game-play­ing gets dead­ly seri­ous, Martel­lo-White intro­duces notes of Michael Haneke, Thomas Clay and Jor­dan Peele to this vision of Eng­lish parochialism. 

Ulti­mate­ly The Strays por­trays the deep, scar­ring dam­age encod­ed by dif­fer­ences of class and race. Cheryl’s high aspi­ra­tions ensure that her code-switch­ing will always be only in one direc­tion – yet the life that she has aban­doned still has claims on her, and so her own slip­pery, fugi­tive nature con­trasts with the descen­dants unhap­pi­ly stuck in her trail. ​“The two worlds don’t mix,” Cheryl will claim, but she must pick through the cur­dled mess that results from the vio­lent col­li­sion of her past and present. 

Hid­den in Martello-White’s bold, assured call­ing card is a provoca­tive alle­go­ry of black expe­ri­ence in white Britain, as char­ac­ters get caught in an evolv­ing con­flict between estrange­ment and assim­i­la­tion, indi­vid­u­al­ism and inau­then­tic­i­ty, pride and self-loathing. Cheryl’s inter­nalised racism, quixot­ic self-repu­di­a­tion and yearn­ing for what she can­not have are both a tragedy of delu­sion, and a hor­rif­ic lega­cy for the next gen­er­a­tion of uproot­ed strays.