Sometimes you can tell from the off when a film just isn't going to click.
Unfortunately, that's what happens to Nathaniel Martello-White's 'The Strays'.
Elaborating a story he heard from his mum, the actor has pulled off a remarkable feat getting Netflix to acquire his debut feature film as a director.
However from the opening moments, something doesn't quite ring true about the film despite its origins.
The opening dialogue sounds too stagey.
It feels too written and regrettably that is a problem it struggles with throughout.
Martello-White, who also wrote the screenplay, tells the story of Ashley Madekwe's Neve, a mother of two teenagers living a nice suburban life.
She has become the deputy headmistress of the school that her son, Samuel Small's Sebastian and Maria Almeida's Mary attend.
Her husband, Justin Salinger's Ian is a successful insurance broker.
They have a nice suburban house, white friends who appear to adore her and they are planning a fundraising event involving the local bigwigs in their neighbourhood.
All is going okay until Neve spies an Afro-Carribbean girl on the street and accidentally runs into a neighbour's car.
This sets in motion a series of events that begin to set her on edge.
© NetflixNeve spies Sebastian talking to a new janitor, then catchez him in possession of weed and she loses it when he returns home very late after a school basketball game.
Like most teens, Mary is glued to the phone but when starts to wear her hair differently in an Afro Carribbean way, Neve is unhappy.
The sudden appearance of Jordan Myrie's Carl and Bukky Bakray's Denise makes matters worse, really rattling her to the core.
Their presence unearths some unnerving family secrets that Neve has been harbouring for many years.
Their revelations will threaten to embarrass Neve but they will also test the family
All of this, you would think, is a good basis for Martello-White's story.
However 'The Strays' just gets off on the wrong foot and never really recovers.
It feels overacted by the cast and is visually flat - a bit like a BBC Radio 4 play committed unimaginatively to the screen.
Martello-White appears to be reaching for an English equivalent of the social horror films of Jordan Peele.
You can sense him trying to embrace the shadows of 'Get Out' and 'Us'.
But the last quarter also has shades of Michael Haneke's 'Funny Games' - both the 1997 and 2007 versions.
Martello-White clearly wants to land points about race and the lengths to which some people will go to be accepted by white neighbours in British society.
He also takes aim at the class divide - accentuating the financial gulf between Carl and Denise and Neve and her family.
But to make this work you have to be shrewd and subtle.
'The Strays,' however, goes about its plot in a very heavy handed manner.
Puccini's 'Madam Butterfly' and Edward Elgar's 'The Dream of Gerontious' sit rather gauchely on the soundtrack alongside Giggs' rap 'Talkin' The Hardest' and the African American ring shout of the McIntosh County Singers' 'Sign of the Judgment', as the director even divides his characters through music.
But worst of all, Martello-White's dialogue - particularly Neve, Ian, Mary and Sebastian's - just doesn't seem authentic enough.
It feels curiously stilted.
As a result, Madekwe, Salinger, Small, Almeida, Myrie and Bakray struggle to convince.
While a lot of viewers may bail before the histrionics of the final quarter, those that do will find it oddly disjointed and unsettling in a way that the writer-director didn't intend because the film doesn't even appear to have the courage to follow the path it carves out.
It all ends rather abruptly and limply, to the point where you wonder if anyone was prepared to call out the obvious weaknesses in Martello-White's script.
Somewhere in 'The Strays' is a decent movie about people burying secrets and about the lengths people will go to be racially accepted.
Perhaps it might have been better for Martello-White to stick with a story that was closer to his mum's tale, going for social realism instead of resorting to audience baiting in this awkward social horror film.
That would have potentially been more memorable and less overcooked than this misfire of a movie.
('The Strays' was made available for streaming on Netflix on February 22, 2023)
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