STRAW (2025)

Tyler Perry's STRAW arrives as a catalog of indignities arranged in ascending order of severity. Taraji P. Henson plays Janiyah, a single mother in Atlanta whose day begins with a landlord's eviction threat and ends with a hostage standoff in a bank lobby. Between those poles sit a WIC dispute at the grocery store, a boss who withholds her paycheck out of spite, a school that summons Child Protective Services, a traffic stop engineered by a vengeful off-duty officer, and an eviction that scatters her furniture onto the sidewalk. The construction is deliberate. Each scene tightens a vise, and Perry wants us to feel the tightening.

The political architecture is unmistakable. Welfare bureaucracy, wage theft, predatory landlords, and the criminal justice apparatus all receive their moment in the dock. The film does not argue that these systems malfunction. It argues that they function. When a crowd gathers outside the bank chanting for Janiyah's release, and when a teller secretly livestreams the standoff to a sympathetic public, the movie converts private catastrophe into public referendum. The sermon arrives without a pulpit. Perry simply stacks the evidence until the audience has no room left to doubt the verdict. A Black ensemble carries the whole weight, led by Henson and supported by Sherri Shepherd, Teyana Taylor, and Glynn Turman, and the casting feels like the world of the story instead of a quota sheet.

Then comes the twist, which reframes everything. Aria, the ill daughter who motivates every frantic decision, died the night before. She was a hallucination. This is a psychological device, not an argument about mental health, and the film treats grief as narrative machinery. Instead, the quiet solidarity of women lingers: Nicole the bank manager who stays behind, the detective who negotiates, the neighbor who offers money. The film has no use for queer lives, no interest in the climate, no comment on body image. Its obsessions are narrower: money, race, mothers, and the American habit of punishing the poor for being poor. Exhausting, sincere, and entirely certain of its own righteousness.