BY ROGER WATSON
Of all the films I have watched, Straw is one of the most painful—but it is meant to be. The title presumably refers to the proverbial straw that broke the camel’s back. Straw (2025) tells the story of a woman living in dire circumstances, whose situation escalates from terrible to tragic, ultimately breaking her.
Janiyah Wiltkinson, portrayed powerfully by Taraji P. Henson, is a single mother with a sick daughter. She cannot pay her rent and struggles to complete a full shift at work due to constant calls from her daughter’s school and the hospital. Her boss at the supermarket is unsympathetic, refusing to offer any flexibility or advance her wages to help cover the rent.
The action unfolds over a single day. It begins with Janiyah waking up next to her daughter, disturbed by thumping music from a neighbouring apartment. She must bathe her child, who had recently been left alone and had fallen. Upon leaving her apartment, Janiyah is confronted by her landlady, who threatens to evict her belongings if the rent is not paid immediately.
After dropping her daughter off at school, Janiyah arrives late to work and is shouted at by her boss. A customer throws a bottle of liquor at her, and she is later caught on a call from the school. She requests a short break to deliver lunch money to her daughter and is given just thirty minutes to also stop by the bank and return.
The call from the school was a pretext for the headteacher to confront her about her daughter’s injury, hunger, and general unkemptness. Stressed and driving back to work, she cuts off an off-duty police officer who then chases her, forces her car to spin, and—with the help of an on-duty officer—threatens to throw the book at her.
Of course, she is late back to work, gets fired, and cannot collect her wages as they need to be processed. She returns home to find her belongings, as promised, out on the street along with her daughter’s medication. She goes back to confront her boss once more, pleading that she needs the job, but while she is there a hooded gunman turns up to rob the supermarket’s safe. Her boss, naturally, assumes she is in cahoots with the gunman, at which point Janiyah ‘loses her shit’ and in the process shoots the gunman. Her boss is remarkably ungrateful, so she shoots him too. The only break she gets is finding her paycheque, albeit covered in blood. We are still only about twenty minutes into a ninety-minute film. And things get worse.
At this point, you should know that Janiyah is black and, apart from a handful of white actors all playing baddies, the cast is almost entirely black. Of course, there is an ‘if you’re black…’ sentiment (that line is even used once) underlying the main theme. Things sure look bad for these black folks in the USA but, as anyone who has read Deep South by Paul Theroux will know, things are bad for some white folks too.
Janiyah heads to the bank to cash her cheque, with the gun. She has no intention of using it, but when she places it on the counter while trying to convince the cashier—who insists on seeing some form of ID—that she has previously had cheques cashed without ID, the cashier panics and hands her all the money she has. Janiyah insists that she only wants the money she is owed. Meanwhile, the alarm is sent out from the bank that they are being robbed and the cavalry arrives.
As if the plot was not contrived in the first place, I think a great deal of the rest of the plot was also contrived to spin it out for the full ninety minutes. There is the customary good-cop, bad-cop situation and Stockholm syndrome-like sympathy from some customers caught up in the ‘robbery’, while others have no sympathy. All well-worn devices in siege movies.
Janiyah’s plight is broadcast on television and a campaign is mounted, with protesters outside the bank, to ‘Free Janiyah’. Of course, the situation is eventually resolved and two endings are provided: one bloody and one peaceful. I am still unsure which one was meant to have happened.
Despite my critical tone, I quite enjoyed the film. I was intrigued to see what would happen next and what the outcome would be. As the stress and situations mounted, there were points at which I was not sure whether I was watching a comedy or a thriller. I see that, on Wikipedia, the film is described as a ‘psychological crime drama’ so it is probably just as well I did not laugh. The 55% it has been scored on Rotten Tomatoes seems about right.
Roger Watson is a Registered Nurse and Editor-in-Chief of Nurse Education in Practice.