Female Film Critics 24/375
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.
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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.
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Along with terror and trauma, school shootings sadly inspire their own genre, with films dramatizing these events or the lives of those in their wake. The elegiac drama The Graduates covers similar ground, dropping into a suburban Utah high school a year after a shooting, but this gentle, even hopeful film tiptoes up to viewers like someone wanting to offer comfort without reopening a wound. In its thoughtful, tender way, it transcends the flashpoints of such horror, embracing a broader view of grief and survival.
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Tyler Taormina is developing as the new auteur of surreal, suburban Americana. Long Island through his lens becomes a space filled with odd rituals conducted in diners, parking lots, or empty streets at night. After his oneiric night song and dialogue free Happer’s Comet, the aural assault of Christmas Eve in Miller’s Point suggests a very different kind of Long Island experience – cluttered and chaotic. Taormina’s tribute to the strangeness of the everyday extends into the ritual of a large extended family Christmas.
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A White woman peers through the windows of an elegant modern home. A Black woman opens the door. “Um, hi. I haven’t seen you here before,” the White woman says. The audacity of the implied question is one microaggression that Ray, the Black woman in this interaction, faces in We Strangers. Debuting at the 2024 SXSW Film Festival, this empathetic drama full of wry humor puts viewers in Ray’s shoes as she navigates racism and classism while trying to use things she learns to her advantage.
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Writer/director Owen Kline’s Funny Pages is a sly, clever film. Just when I thought I knew exactly where it set its sights, the story heads off in another direction, much to my delight. That’s because most plots follow a conventional trajectory, one reinforced by dozens, if not hundreds, of predictable literary and cinematic works.
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An gentle ensemble comedy-drama, The Outside Story is small movie with, yes, a big heart. And that’s a good thing. Brooklyn-based documentary filmmaker Charles (Brian Tyree Henry) has been in a serious rut since he split up with his girlfriend, lawyer Isha (Sonequa Martin-Green), whose belongings–packed in boxes scattered around the brownstone apartment–serve as constant reminders of her absence.
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