Set in Gary, Indiana, “We Strangers” (2024) follows Rayelle “Ray” Martin (Kirby Howell-Baptiste) as she realizes that being her own boss is a state of mind. While working as a cleaner for Spotless Office Studios at a doctor’s office, she accepts an offer from Dr. Neeraj Patel (Hari Dhillon) to clean his house and begin her own cleaning business. Her role expands to a ridiculous extent until she reaches her limit. Where does Ray draw the line?
“We Strangers” is billed as a drama, but as the definition for comedy expands, and laughs are no longer required, it could fall in that category as well. At work, Ray is a still, calm, confident presence. Her face betrays nothing, and she plays her cards close to her vest, but Howell-Baptiste’s eyes or a counter-intuitive expression like a tightening of the lips reveal her character’s real thoughts on what is unfolding in front of her. At home, she is much more transparent and expressive. Anywhere she goes, people want more from her than she is already giving. She goes further voluntarily for those whom she loves, but everyone else can pay. Even those who pay want more than Ray is willing to give so she zigs when they expect her to zag. She agrees to be their magical negro, i.e. a psychic, when she is just perceptive and using context clues to guide them and help them feel seen in their discontent, turbulent, lonely lives.
Dr. Patel is the definition of “give an inch, take a mile.” His idea of consent is slippery. Initially the employer-employee relationship goes as expected until his next-door neighbor, Jean Leich (Maria Dizzia), comes sneaking around during Ray’s shift. Jean interrogates Ray as if she has a right to the information but backs down once she establishes that Ray is cleaning thus has an acceptable reason for being in the Patel home and scurries away when Ray offers to get Dr. Patel. What initially seems like a microaggression is revealed to be a sign of something else. Dr. Patel pays a lot more than Ray expected then revealed the string attached: clean the Laich home.
Jean does not need her but does not pass up the opportunity to boss someone around. Her husband, Ed (Paul Adelstein), is initially rude, but becomes more cordial with a side of oblivious microaggressions directed to an ethnic group that Ray does not belong to. With a television show inspiring her, Ray suddenly finds her footing and claims that she is a psychic, which means more money and putting herself in a position of authority, but with paying money comes raised customer expectations, which leads to an implicit tug of war of who is in charge: the person paying or the person with the expertise.
Not everyone is thrilled. The Patels teenage daughter, Sunny (Mischa Reddy), sees Ray as an adult that she can use to evade her parents’ restrictions, but Ray expects to be paid. They end up in a battle of wills with mixed results. Ray stands to lose money or her dignity as Sunny enjoys treating her like a servant and uses the only authority that she has against an adult, her parents’ authority and implicit bias. Ray uses her status as an adult to assert some authority but her self-assured reserve of what she can and cannot do is what keeps her in control. Sunny is the worst because she has not learned the rules of passive aggressive dominance.
Sarah Goldberg as Sunny’s mom, Dr. Patel’s wife and Jean’s frenemy, comes off as a professional who fits the expected employer dynamic. She wants information about the Laich family without explicitly digging. She wants to elicit Ray’s opinion about her clothes but also wants to play the great lady of the house who gives her clothes to the help. When it is psychic time, she positions herself as a debunker in demeanor, but Ray’s insight into her life levels her to the ground.
Segments of “We Strangers” is often punctuated with solid images of the color from her readings or of Mount Pelée, a volcano in Martinique, which Ray is presumably seeing in her dreams long before the story about its relevance is referenced in the dialogue. Ray expresses her desire to find a way to work while sleeping. Work dominates everyone’s mind whether they do it or not. Ray’s mom, Willie (Tina Lifford), constantly needs Ray to drive her to work at the local supermarket, Country Safe Foods. Her girlfriend, Mari (Kara Young), needs Ray to babysit her kids so she can take shifts as they become available. Things come to a head around the time of the Laich party as her employers grow increasingly self-destructive and strain against their usual self-imposed limits for themselves. The lines begin to blur for Ray, and she begins to feel the need to be herself without satisfying others’ needs. A flirtation with a party guest, Daniel (Jared Canfield), is the beginning of rousing her from deceiving herself that her burgeoning business’ demands is sustainable, and she has found a way to relax into financial security and community.
Writer and director Anu Valia’s debut feature is a strong indie film. Valia never goes to sensational lengths to sustain interest yet keeps everything unpredictable. “We Strangers” is a strong character study and watching the mixing and matching of different characters interacting never gets stale. Considering that most films either retread old tropes or are sequels or remakes, it is unusual to find a movie that defies assumptions. It may be a more radical work than “Snowpiercer” (2013) without having to transcend the rules of contemporary time, place. Unlike “Good Madam” (2022), it does not have to resort to the horror genre to find a way for a servant to upend the status quo. Any blood shed is part of a self-inflicted wound
Visually Valia is on the top of her game in terms of visually setting the tone and telling the story. She has a wonderful sense of composition and framing characters in space with each other to reflect that while they are in the same room, they are having radically different experiences. She uses the house structure to create frames for the characters. It feels as if cinematographer James Laxton and director Barry Jenkins’ “Moonlight” (2016) are her inspirations. Valia and cinematographer Charlotte Hornsby have more of a sense of humor in a strait-laced way with a riveting dance sequence in a bar or punctuating the monotony and indignity of cleaning without making it boring. Editor James Codoyannis uses a treadmill scene to shift gears and have Ray and Dr. Patel constantly trade places in terms of who has the upper hand, when they are on the same level, and things become hilariously disastrous.
“We Strangers” is interesting. It has a great lesson: your personal life is more important than your work so if work is going off the rails, it does not matter. You are still in charge. Also, it poses an interesting moral question. Is Ray behaving badly or rising to the challenge of her employers’ constant increasing demands that she cannot fulfill in the capacity of the duties that they originally hired her to fulfill?
