Netflix tried to make a British Get Out, but it went wrong

polygon.com:

Jordan Peele’s Get Out is a brilliant, successful movie that left a comet-like tail blazing across the art and business of film. It’s inspired plenty of opportunistic copycats — but it’s also inspired a generation of marginalized filmmakers, especially Black filmmakers, to use thrillers and horror movies as vehicles for the themes that matter most to them. Just as important: It persuaded studios and production companies that enabling those filmmakers isn’t just the right thing to do, it’s smart business.

This time last year, Sundance Film Festival was overwhelmed with stories like these: smart, furious movies like MasterandNanny that sometimes chafed against their genre frameworks, but in interesting ways. Back in 2020, Netflix produced Remi Weekes’ His House, one of the best British horror films of recent years, a chilling haunted-house movie that explores, with great specificity, the experience of Sudanese asylum-seekers clinging to the precarious, crumbling foothold they’ve been offered in British life.

Netflix’s latest Brit thriller, The Strays, initially feels like a similar prospect. If anything, it hews even closer to Get Out, as it drops the supernatural allegory and horror imagery in favor of something more psychologically real, more disturbingly close to the surface of society. But that’s even more difficult to execute tonally — and writer-director Nathaniel Martello-White, making his feature debut, doesn’t pull it off — at least, not until the movie’s final moments.

Ashley Madekwe plays Neve, a woman living a polished existence in an affluent part of rural England, where large midcentury homes sprawl tastefully among the trees, the towns are full of cute tea shops, and life revolves around expensive private