“The Strays” opens in a dreary housing property in London the place Cheryl (Ashley Madekwe) is having a low day. She’s as much as her eyeballs in debt, struggling to pay the payments, and, as a light-skinned Black girl, feels discrimination throughout her. She needs a greater life for herself and decides to exit and get it. Leaving a observe for her abusive companion saying she is popping to the hairdresser, she packs a bag and does a disappearing act as a substitute.
Years later, Cheryl has turn out to be Neve, dwelling in a middle-class neighborhood within the prosperous village of Castle Combe in Wiltshire. She is the deputy head of a fancy personal faculty and married to Ian (Justin Salinger), with whom she has two kids, Mary (Maria Almeida) and Sebastian (Samuel Small). She appears to have all of it: A profitable profession as an educator, joyful marriage, a gorgeous dwelling, and a revered place in a predominantly white neighborhood.
In order to combine, she has fastidiously modified the way in which she talks, clothes, and wears straight-haired wigs, code-switching to slot in. She obsessively suppresses her ethnicity to the purpose that, in keeping with her son, “anything Black is off limits.” Yet her outward self-confidence and adopted middle-class accent masks deep-seated unhappiness and nervousness about her origins.
Cracks quickly seem and Neve begins unspooling mentally when she spots two different Black individuals, Marvin (Jordan Myrie) and Abi (Bukky Bakray), apparently stalking her new household. It does not take a lot to guess that they’re her youngsters from her earlier relationship in London, and the film rewinds to indicate how they’ve been traumatized by their abandonment. Now they’re in Castle Combe to pressure their means again into her life.