The great Malcolm D. Lee’s new Peacock streamer Strung opens with an arresting scene of Laila Calloway (the potentially computer-animated actor and popstar Chloe Bailey), a classical violinist leading an orchestra on stage when she suddenly experiences something like a psychotic break — or a haunting involving a dead child and a mangled hand, quoting horror-adjacent movies about the pressures put on high-performing prodigies in the fine arts like Black Swan, or Whiplash, or even reality-bending hard horror like the Smile franchise, but with a Black woman at the center of that drama. The rest of the film also has traces of several types of films in it, all of which might have been good and none of which are fully or even partially committed to. It’s a horror film that’s not scary, a psychosexual thriller that isn’t slick and horny enough, satire without a point and which isn’t smart, and camp that isn’t fun. That it has promising elements of all these films makes it more disappointing than a simple bad movie. One assumes the culprit isn’t a confused blend of sensibilities from any two specific films or genres, but rather the meld of its two main producers, Tyler Perry and Jason Blum, an unholy union that won’t satisfy fans of either.
The film’s trajectory is established when the broke, ambitious Calloway is approached by Audra Jelani (veteran Lynn Whitfield, who actually knows what movie she’s in), a rich, seductive older woman who hires her to come live in a mansion to de facto nanny and instruct Jelani’s talented granddaughter on the piano. The family is nouveau riche, their fortune derived from a rapper who died in an alleged overdose several years earlier, and the child is his daughter Zuri (Romy Woods, from Abbott Elementary, most naturalistic in show), a bright, sensitive, disturbed kid with a number of emotional and physical maladies. Throughout, Calloway is coached over the phone by her friend Jasmine (Coco Jones) in the seemingly mandatory Lil Rel Howery-style role, functioning as the audience-surrogate, dash of levity role these movies all have to have now.
From there Strung becomes part haunted house flick and part creepy kid slow, hallucinatory suspense as Calloway slowly unravels. Lee’s film leans on the visual language Monkeypaw Productions has infused racial horror with over the past decade, but this is the cheapest utilization of loaded touches, like a child who won’t take off a Dahomie tribal mask. Anna Diop — literally from Us — and Netflix rotation player Lucien Laviscount are Imani and Marcus Walker, an absurdly hot couple who are not so subtly into Laila’s whole vibe and recruiting the help as a third, until they’re not. The film eventually drops the horror and reveals itself as a soap that wants to be about crabs-in-a-barrel race and class, but that would require a degree of thought and thematic development that the film doesn’t have the requisite time or attention span to pull off. For instance, Calloway is traumatized by a dead little sister that this writer doesn’t know how to work into this review coherently, because Strung doesn’t either.
On a more positive note, the film looks good and is well-made, making good use of its primary single location — which was apparently shot in Capetown, South Africa, rather than Perry’s fiefdom in Atlanta, which might be the single most confusing thing about this baffling production. There’s also a great score — from Tribe Called Quest’s Ali Shaheed Muhammad and the L.A.-based composer and Ghostface Killah producer Adrian Younge (the pair’s last collaboration was Kendrick Lamar’s “untitled 06”) — and music direction that capably shifts between classical, jazz, and grown, sexy hip hop in its many diegetic needle drops. But Strung is completely let down by both journeyman Alan B. McElroy’s soft-boiled script and the majority of performances here, particularly from Bailey, who attended the same acting school as her sister, seemingly designed for a viewer scrolling through social media and uninterested in needing to look up to get a sense of what emotion is being conveyed at any given moment.
As the movie eventually, arbitrarily lands on the most boring solution to the vague mysteries its plot has raised, what may strike the viewer most is how unfortunate it is that Strung isn’t as frothy as it could’ve been, should’ve been, and needed to be in order to be worth the time spent in its presence. The ultimate, sum issue that arises from the film’s myriad flaws is the severe tone and packaging doesn’t match the story, and so any necessary gleeful sliminess is sorely missing, despite the best efforts of the aforementioned performance that understood the assignment. That mistmatched effect renders the murder and smut diagrammatic and perfunctory.
Lee has long served as a ball-knower’s favorite. For much of his career, he’s been a humanist auteur of dramedy hiding in plain sight, with a journeymen’s rep. But when you look at the years since 2017’s Girls Trip, his last truly great film that felt distinctly his, things have been getting stretched out and bleak the further the director has got from the helm of his career-defining Best Man franchise. What should be confusing to anyone who follows him is why he’s taking on turkeys of late, like LeBron and Warner Brothers’ shit out Space Jam sequel or Blum and Perry’s Strung, but there is one fairly obvious answer. And so, it’s at this moment that must pray we don’t look back at some point in the future and identify this stretch as the moment Lee became the sturdy, flavorless studio hand casuals always confused him as.
DIRECTOR: Malcolm D. Lee; CAST: Chloe Bailey, Lynn Whitfield, Lucien Laviscount, Anna Diop, Coco Jones; DISTRIBUTOR: Peacock; STREAMING: June 24; RUNTIME: 1 hr. 59 min.
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