The Weight of STRAW

It’s a spectacularly bad day. A Black single mother watches helplessly as her daughter is taken away at school by Children and Family Services. Minutes later, some racist cops run her off the road and impound her car. Then she’s fired from her job at the supermarket. And when she finally gets back to her apartment, she finds all her and her daughter’s belongings dumped outside. It’s pouring rain. She keeps shouting “no,” over and over, before finally throwing her head back and screaming at the sky.

The scene made my eyes sting, yet at the same time, I felt a secondhand cringe so intense it was almost funny. That pretty much sums up my experience of watching STRAW (2025), and what drove me up the wall about it. Sure enough, about twenty days after its Netflix release, the film has settled at 52 % on the Tomatometer and 71 % with audiences—a clear divide between critics and viewers compared to other recent hits.

And it’s not hard to see why. I’m shocked we’re still using such outdated tropes in 2025—the “tormented protagonist howling in the rain” part is painfully literal. The performance of the Black female cop (Teyana Taylor) in a supporting role was so unconvincing that I started questioning the competence of the entire unit. I even paused the movie to look up the director, Tyler Perry. I hadn’t really heard of him before, but it turns out he’s no rookie. He has made plenty of films about Black stories, though none score especially high.

STRAW follows Janiyah (Taraji P. Henson), who holds down two jobs yet can barely survive while caring for a young daughter with epilepsy and asthma. In the course of a single day, she's crushed by a cascade of disasters that ends with her stumbling into a robbery. One shot rings out, then another. Suddenly Janiyah is the prime suspect. By the time she staggers into a bank to cash her paycheck, she’s holding a gun in one hand and her daughter’s backpack in the other. Inside the bag is a science project, but to everyone around her, it looks like a bomb. Things only go downhill from there: terrified bank employees and customers, a police standoff, a brutal intervention by the FBI...

It’s meant to be a conventional social-realist crime drama, where the stakes escalate until the protagonist is trapped in the worst possible corner. But in execution, it’s riddled with problems: an overstuffed narrative, overwhelming sentimentality, and an attempt to draw on too many “important issues” at once. That kind of approach can be risky. It easily invites a certain meritocratic arrogance from viewers who end up blaming the character for her own suffering. I even saw a short review scolding poor people for blaming society instead of taking responsibility—and disturbingly, it had quite a few likes. That mindset is more common than we think. At one point, I caught myself rewriting the story in my head to turn Janiyah into a more "acceptable" victim, like, maybe she could've wounded her boss instead of killing him. Then I realized I wasn't all that different from the people I was judging.

Still, the film’s core emotions—Janiyah’s rage, despair, helplessness—feel raw and alarmingly genuine, striking a nerve in this specific political moment. The movie taps into our growing collective distrust of institutions—police, social services, the system itself. I’d be lying if it didn’t remind me of the recent protests in Los Angeles. I’m continents away and hardly know the full story, but the brutal deportations splashed across the news look exactly like scenes I’ve watched on-screen for years.

Then comes the late-game punch, the shocking ending that justifies the title. We assume today’s avalanche of catastrophes is the straw that broke Janiyah’s back, until it reveals that the real last straw fell yesterday, and it’s more heartbreaking than anything we’ve just witnessed.

So no, STRAW isn’t what I’d call a good film. But the fury at its core is real enough to make you wince—and keep watching even if you're also cringing.