Strung (now on Peacock) is a collaborative Blumhouse/Tyler Perry joint starring Chloe Bailey as a musician who finds herself in a sort of Hand-That-Rocks-the-Cradle-in-reverse situation. Is it as silly as that sounds? Yeah, pretty much. Imagine the trademark Perry melodramatic-preposterous-thriller thing smooshed together with the cheap Blumhouse horror-adjacent aesthetic, then throw in a couple of smolder-y sex scenes, and you’ve got yourself some good old-fashioned trashy fun—in theory, anyway.
STRUNG: STREAM IT OR SKIP IT?
The Gist: We meet Laila (Bailey) in the middle of a dream that’s trying to tell us all about her: She’s a concert violinist who sees a haunted little girl in the audience. Suddenly she can’t play anything right. Her fingers are all gnarled and busted. The only thing that’s missing from this is her being naked in front of a crowd. Her reality is far more drab, for now. She’s unsuccessfully tried out for the philharmonic a couple of times. She settles on visiting children’s music classes (almost certainly for pennies) and crashing on her bestie Jasmine’s (Coco Jones) couch. Laila has no life. She’s in a rut. She doesn’t have any prospects. It would be too bad if a too-good-to-be-true opportunity presented itself and backfired in her face, wouldn’t it? Yes. Yes it would.
Then one day she meets Audra (Lynn Whitfield), who presents Laila with a too-good-to-be-true opportunity that will never, ever (ever!) backfire in her face. See, Audra’s granddaughter needs a live-in music tutor. Yeah, live-in. Seems far-fetched, until Laila gets to the house and learns that it’s a palace, complete with a chauffeur and a cook with blood all over her apron, for some reason. Laila will be the Naive Newcomer to the staff who’s wowed by the cushy, new digs and the robust salary. She’ll be tutoring Zuri (Romy Woods), who wears an oversized African warrior mask all the time. The prevailing notion is that this mask is to this girl as the security blanket is to Linus, although we see it as something else entirely: a red flag.
But Laila, stupid as the dickens, hangs in there, even though Zuri’s mother, Imani (Anna Diop), is openly hostile toward her. The prevailing notion is that it’s pregnancy hormones, although we see it as another red flags. Zuri is Imani’s child from a previous marriage to a famous rapper who died. (Yep, red flag!) Zuri’s stepdad/the baby’s dad-dad is Marcus (Lucien Laviscount), a music-biz exec who coincidentally happens to be the same dude Laila had a one-night-stand with in the first act. SO MANY RED FLAGS.
Did I mention that Laila is soon asked to do laundry and serve smoothies to Imani? Music tutor, my ass. You want to grab her by the lapels, pull her in real close, and utter the immortal words: Get. Out. But of course she doesn’t. Otherwise, this wouldn’t be much of a movie, would it? The thing with Marcus is the first twist that revs up this plot, which involves Zuri’s bounty of dangerous allergies, some jealousy pertaining to Laila’s sweet and nurturing relationship with the girl, and a pet viper, for some reason. And at this point, I’ll stop summarizing so you can hope all this coalesces into one hell of an idiotic ending.
What Movies Will It Remind You Of? Imagine the aforementioned The Hand That Rocks the Cradle nanny nonsense crossed with the music-school thriller/early Sydney Sweeney Blumhouse-produced vehicle Nocturne (note: underrated!), then immolated on the Tyler Perry pyre.
Performance Worth Watching: Well, let’s just say Whitfield really knows how to make a right grand Vegas buffet out of the scenery.
Sex And Skin: A few sex scenes registering 7.3/10 on the Smolder Scale, although all we ever see is a bum or a sideboob.
Our Take: Indeed, Strung coalesces into one hell of an idiotic ending, although I’m not sure it’s worth enduring the first 90 minutes of this slop-ass screenplay (written by the guy behind the immortal Ballistic: Ecks vs. Sever) to get to the final 30. Yes, your math is correct – this is one of those I-can’t-believe-there’s-still-an-hour-left-in-this-movie movies that fails to justify its two-hour run time, with all its go-nowhere plot convolutions and inability to settle on a tone. Despite his status as a veteran director, Malcolm D. Lee (Girls Trip, The Best Man) seems to have shrugged his shoulders at the final edit, thinking, it’s just a streaming movie people will half-pay attention to anyway, not caring that a crisp 92-minute cut might draw out the nutty campiness and rightfully render the melodrama as fodder for the bin.
Instead, the film jumbles together a grab bag of forbidden erotic romance, wackadoo mother-in-law histrionics, real estate porn, reams of klutzy dialogue, cheap child-endangerment nonsense, unprocessed trauma and confounding snake action. It’s just so damn flabby. Lee can’t even muster the enthusiasm to throw red herrings at us; he just drops them on the floor until they’re a cluttered mess of distractions, easily brushed aside so you can predict what happens with minimal effort. You’ll be better off just skipping to the end and watching everyone pull out all the stops. Fast-forward until you get to the scene where a character drinks some knockout juice and falls face-first onto the dinner table. It won’t make much sense, but it doesn’t make much sense if you’ve watched the entire movie, either. Unfortunately, I know from experience.
Our Call: Busted string. It sounds like this: sproinngggg. SKIP IT.
John Serba is a freelance film critic from Grand Rapids, Michigan. Werner Herzog hugged him once.
