OUT OF THE PAST
A woman’s secret history surfaces to splinter her present in an accomplished debut thriller…
You don’t get too many British debuts like Nathaniel Martello-White’s The Strays. Brit flicks comes in all shapes and guises, but kitchen-sink dramas and period films are the national staple, and low-budget features are often televisual. Social thriller The Strays, however, exhibits a cinematic sheen and controlled formalism.
“The image should be active,” says Martello-White, hitherto best known as an actor (Silent Night, I Hate Suzie). Cla’am, a short he wrote and directed in 2017, was accepted by South by Southwest, and now his impressive debut feature is dropping on Netflix. “No image should be for free – it should be loaded with feeling and meaning.”
Cla’am was a “comedy-horror about gentrification in and around the Brixton area.”
The Strays, though genre-leaning, focuses more on character drama as we spend time with a well-to-do suburban family. This seemingly perfect unit consists of lightskinned Black mother Neve (Ashley Madekwe), white father Ian (Justin Salinger) and their two teenage kids (Samuel Paul Small, Maria Almeida). But then a mystery duo played by Jorden Myrie and Rocks’ Bukky Bakray pitch up from out of Neve’s past, and things go south, rapidly. “I’m influenced by the Coen Brothers and Yorgos Lanthimos and Michael Haneke,” Martello-White says, explaining how Big Themes are often best treated by genre movies. “Sometimes you can make your subject too narrow if you make a realist film.” For Martello-White, The Strays is laced with personal meaning. “I was inspired by my mother’s experience. As a biracial woman, she has traversed different classes and had to deal with racism on both sides, and she had to code switch and find ways to survive.”
There’s plenty to unpack in The Strays, but the conversation concludes as it began – musing upon how this debut feels like a fresh voice in British filmmaking. “The trope of the outsider shaking things up is straight out of westerns,” notes Martello-White. “You get it in a lot of American cinema, these whitepicket communities, pulled apart. I was particularly struck by A History of Violence.
We don’t really make British films like that. I don’t know why.”
THE STRAYS RELEASES ON NETFLIX THIS SPRING.