MOVIE OF THE WEEK August 22, 2025: WE STRANGERS
The consequences of what can happen when a person is “othered” are front and center in writer-director Anu Valia’s atmospheric drama We Strangers. As it tells the story of a young Black woman named Ray (Kirby Howell-Baptiste) and her dissonant, uncomfortable relationships with the people who hire her to clean their houses, the film — Valia’s feature debut — explores the complex intersection of race, class, and power dynamics.
Ray is a practical person who’s happy to work hard if she’s getting paid well, so she’s content to take Dr. Neeraj Patel (Hari Dhillon) up on his request to clean the house he shares with his wife, Tracy (Barry‘s Sarah Goldberg), and teen daughter, Sunny (Mischa Reddy), after he meets Ray while she’s helping clear out his newly leased office space. Soon Ray finds herself being asked, without too much choice in the matter, to clean for Dr. Patel’s neighbors the Laiches, too. But money is money, and she has a mother and friends who need her help, so why not?
Ray is both irritated and amused by brittle Tracy Patel and flighty Jean Laich (Maria Dizzia) — the latter of whom is quick to regard Ray with suspicion upon first seeing her in Patel’s home but then seemingly tickled by the idea of befriending someone “exotic.” When Jean voices her interest in the spiritual realm, Ray pretends to be a psychic to keep the cash coming. Things come to a head the night the Laiches have a party, which Ray ostensibly attends as a guest but during which she’s treated mostly as a fascinating curiosity.
The power of We Strangers is in the way Valia depicts the differences between who Ray really is and who she is when she’s in Jean and Tracy’s world. With the people she loves, Ray is warm, talkative, messy; when she’s in the homes she cleans, she’s always guarded, careful. She can’t say what she thinks, lest Tracy feel her patronizing “generosity” isn’t appreciated, or Jean decide that Ray isn’t “one of the good ones” after all. Valia puts her spare screenplay and carefully composed shots to good use conveying the tense friction of the situation; it feels like everything could take a calamitous turn at any moment. But in the end, the very mundanity of it all is even more telling. — Betsy Bozdech
Team #MOTW’s comments:
Loren King Anu Valia’s debut feature riveted me from the start. We follow the seemingly simple work life of housecleaner Rayelle (Kirby Howell-Baptiste) as she goes about her job in a doctor’s home office in the suburbs of Gary, Indiana. A weird encounter with a neighbor, Jean (Maria Dizzia), whose awkward and suspicious questions telegraph her discomfort about a young Black woman in the neighborhood, sets a tone of domestic creepiness. There’s a slow burn sense of dread that the film never lets up on, even though it’s assuredly nuanced and low key. Rayelle ends up also doing work as a psychic for the two white women she’s cleaning for, delivering enough insightful observations to hook them into believing she knows their innermost thoughts. But Rayelle is aware enough to know these women inherently mistrust her; the way a Black woman functions in the everyday world is beautifully and subtly conveyed by Howell-Baptiste as Rayelle walks a tightrope of friendliness, boundaries and self-preservation. We Strangers is a smart, sharp edged character study that’s also a sly social critique.
Nell Minow: We Strangers is a fierce and vital film made with singular vision, superb cinematography, a bracing score, and a powerhouse performance by Kirby Howell-Baptiste. It is a sensitive, nuanced, insightfully observed study of shifting power dynamics. Anu Valia’s first feature shows remarkable confidence and impressive willingness to trust the audience.
Sherin Nicole Kirby Howell-Baptiste anchors We Strangers as Ray, a commercial cleaner whose blithe lie to her wealthy clients quickly spirals in strange directions. Through Ray’s quiet subversions, director Anu Valia crafts an exploration of how deceit can serve as both passive revenge and a reversal of power, making this feature debut a sharp study of class, manipulation, and self-preservation.
Leslie Combemale We Strangers is one of those films whose story and its meaning, as well as the layers of depth first-time feature writer/director Anu Valia infuses into it, sneak up on you. It seems like a simple, almost slice of life drama, but there are racial and class dynamics at play and the leveraging of privilege that Valia builds, in a fascinating and very femme-forward examination of those issues. It wouldn’t work nearly as well without a well-balanced use of collaboration behind the scenes. The music, editing, and cinematography all service and enhance the storytelling.
Jennifer Merin Filmmaker Anu Valia’s first feature, We Strangers, is a subversive, darkly funny and bitter narrative commentary on socio-economic racial profiling. The story centers on Ray, a young, intelligent, responsible, well-mannered Black woman who works as a for-hire house cleaner. She is diligent and thorough in her work. Her clients are well-to-do families, mostly White, who recommend her to each other, passing along her good services in the same way they’d share a recipe for pesto. Read full review.
Sandie Angulo Chen: In her debut feature We Strangers, first-time director Anu Valia delivers a sharp, incisive drama about class, race, and domestic labor. Kirby Howell-Baptiste is revelatory in a nuanced, unforgettable performance as Rayelle Martin, a commercial office cleaner who takes on a dentist client’s home (and the neighbors’), only to encounter condescension, microaggressions, and outright deception. Rayelle contributes her own fabrication — that she can speak to the dead — adding another twist to the power dynamics at play. Part Parasite, part Maid, and part Get Out, the film balances biting social commentary with engrossing storytelling.
Cate Marquis When Ray, a smart, enterprising Black woman working cleaning offices, gets an offer from a doctor whose office she is cleaning to come clean his house in a side deal apart from the cleaning company she’s working for, she sees a financial opportunity. What she steps into is something stranger, although profitable at first, in filmmaker Anu Valia’s darkly comic We Strangers. Cleaning the doctor’s house goes well, except for a neighbor, a white women, who comes over to glare at her and suspiciously ask why she is in the doctor’s house. But things get stranger when the doctor offers to pay Ray an extra fee to clean the strange neighbor’s house, opening the door to plenty of strangeness. The doctor is South Asian but his wife and their affluent suburban neighbors are white, and all are clueless about their racism and somewhat less clueless about their classism. In dealing with Ray, they make assumptions about her based on stereotypical ideas. Instead of recoiling, clever Ray plays along with some of this but smartly charges them extra for every odd, presumptive request or assumption. Director Anu Valia alternates between scenes of Ray’s time with these clueless, too-comfortable people and Ray’s home life, which grounds her, with her best friend or her mother, an approach that delivers dark humor and insights sometimes flavored with the sardonic.
FILM DETAILS:
Title: We Strangers
Directors: Anu Valia
Release Date: August 22, 2025
Running Time: 80 minutes
Language: English
Screenwriters: Anu Valia
Lead Performers: Kirby Howell-Baptiste, Hari Dhillon ,Maria Dizzia,Mischa Reddy, Sarah Goldberg
Distribution Company: Quiver
AWFJ Movie of the Week Panel Members: Sandie Angulo Chen, Betsy Bozdech, Leslie Combemale, Pam Grady, Loren King, Cate Marquis, Jennifer Merin, Nell Minow, Sherin Nicole, Liz Whittemore
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Edited by Jennifer Merin
