The twisted horror thriller The Strays on Netflix made a big splash when it landed, but the shocking ending left a lot of questions to be answered. Debuting in 2023, The Strays tells the story of Neve, an upper-class woman whose idyllic life comes crashing down when her past begins to catch up to her. Combining elements of hit horror films like Parasite and the works of director Jordan Peele, The Strays uses its thriller premise to make compelling commentary about race, class, and family dynamics. Not without its dramatic elements, The Strays does a lot more than just frighten its audience.
Despite the movie’s lackluster critical reception (via Rotten Tomatoes), The Strays generated quite a bit of buzz from viewers on Netflix, and that was due in large part to its ending. Unconventional in its approach to storytelling, The Strays allows its plot lines to unravel slowly, and it excels because it doesn’t spell everything out for the audience. Like many of the best psychological horror movies, The Strays sticks with the viewer long after its conclusion and continues to challenge them with its hard-hitting themes.
What Is The Significance Of Hair In The Strays?
Though The Strays is packed with visual motifs, the most consistent theme throughout the movie is the characters’ hair. Neve’s hair is especially important to the first third of the movie, and the way she looks at her own hair lets the audience in on everything they need to know about her. Besides her perfectly manicured suburban existence, Neve consistently insists on hiding her natural hair in favor of sleek and well-maintained wigs. Even though her husband Ian is supportive of whatever hairstyle she chooses, she still sticks with the wigs.
When she gets her first glimpses of Dione and Carl, Neve is stricken with a nervous itch that constantly reminds her of her natural hair underneath her wig. She uses the wigs to not only cover up her hair in order to fit in with the white society she has joined, but she also uses them to cover up who she is. During one of her hallucination scenes, Neve is even attacked by her own hair, which symbolizes the grip it has over her life. Neve views her natural hair in a negative light, which explains why she is so reticent to accept her daughter Mary’s hairstyles.
Why Did Carl & Dione Return?
Having revealed that Carl and Dione are actually the estranged children of Neve from an earlier period in her life, The Strays returns to a semblance of normalcy as Neve attempts to pay them off. Though she implies that the money is just for them to get started, it’s obvious that she hopes they will take the money and leave her alone. Having risen through the classes to the point that she can afford to literally pay for her past mistakes, Neve thinks she can put a dollar amount on what she did to Carl and Dione, which sets up the ending of The Strays.
Carl and Dione return to the family’s home with a plan in place because they were not only disturbed by her attempt to offer them such a low amount, but they had no intention of accepting payment in the first place. Judging by the way in which they infiltrate Neve’s home, it’s clear that Carl and Dione want nothing less than to assume the life that Neve’s family has, especially when it comes to the pampered existence of her children. One of the most brilliant aspects of The Strays‘ ending is that it transforms from being another Netflix horror movie into a tense thriller over one tense scene.
Why Did Carl Kill Ian?
Along with Neve’s other children, her husband Ian is an innocent victim caught up in her odd web of deceit. Unfortunately, he faces the full brunt of Carl’s wrath and is presumably killed for it. Though Carl knows that Ian had nothing to do with Neve’s attempt to pay them off, he still needs to kill him in order for his plan to work. Neve abandoned Carl and Dione, but they had no intention of harming her or her other children. Instead, they want to rejoin Neve, which means that Ian has to go because he doesn’t fit into Carl and Dione’s vision of a perfect life.
Why Did Cheryl Become Neve?
As part of her plan for a new life, Cheryl not only turned her back on her children but changed her name to Neve in order to escape. Though the movie suggests several reasons why she left her kids and changed her name, the ending of The Strays seems to imply her motivations were not what she claimed they were. Neve says she abandoned them in order to escape an abusive relationship, but the fact that she leaves her kids again in the last scene points to that being untrue. What’s more likely is that Cheryl became Neve in order to completely erase the past and become harder to find.
Why Did Neve Leave In The End?
Though she seems to be a victim throughout the movie, the ending of The Strays reveals that Neve is not as honest as she lets on. The first third of the movie shows Neve to be a biracial woman who was so desperate to fit into white society that she came off as discriminatory against people of color and her own heritage. However, The Strays‘ middle and last third show there is more to the story. Neve leaving again at the end of The Strays proves her earlier claims about her abandonment of Carl and Dione to be untrue and paints her as the villain.
Neve leaves because her idealized life has come crashing down and there is no way she could rectify the situation. She had attained the life she wanted and had mostly assimilated into white society, but the return of Carl and Dione was just too much for her carefully crafted illusion to sustain. The Strays uses its ending to point to the cyclical nature of trauma, and Neve leaving again only serves to start that process over again, with Mary and Sebastian getting caught up in the mess.
What Ashley Madekwe Said About The Strays Ending
Ashley Madekwe who plays Neve/Cheryl in The Strays had a significant amount of input in the ending of the film. In an interview with Total Film, Madekwe talks about how the director, actors, and crew went through a number of variations of the final scene before getting it right. She says,
“We went through different iterations of it. …I always inferred that the ending that is there now, that was what was happening, with me leaving. We did that in so many different ways. We did it with a wig, without a wig, change of costume, and I think the way we went was the right way. We left a little room for ambiguity but not really. She’s gone, she’s out of there, she did what she had to do.”
According to Madekwe, she was surprised that despite how many times they redid the scene, and how difficult the set was to maintain, it still came out well. The takes in the final scene are all very long, so each time they redid it, the practical effects of water, blood, and broken props all had to be put back in position. It’s an effort that clearly paid off.
The Real Meaning Of The Strays Ending
Though Neve comes off as the villain of The Strays, she is still the victim of a society that forced her out to the margins. The opening scene shows a harried and desperate Cheryl feeling she has no place in the lily-white society of England, and that explains why she wants so desperately to suppress all elements of her blackness. Unfortunately for Carl and Dione, the only way that Neve can think to improve her situation is by abandoning them, which continues the cycle of psychological trauma that will eventually haunt Mary and Sebastian. The ending of The Strays implies Cheryl’s trauma will live on through them.
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