Netflix’s The Strays Ending Explained- Who Is Dione And Carl, And What Happens To Neve?

What would you do to start over? Would you give up everything to fix the things in your life you aren’t happy with? Who’s fault is it you are unhappy? The Strays asks all those questions and more in a creepy twister that borrows from some of the best until the wheels fall off and things completely fall apart. There is so much that is uncertain about The Strays. Even after the credits roll, there are still mysteries. Netflix’s latest psychological thriller joins the overcrowded social commentary as horror market with more ideas than conclusions. Who is in the right or the wrong in this film that is lite on subtext in favor of atmospheric chills and terrible life decisions?

There are a lot of borrowed visual cues that this is from the same metaphysical universe as Us. Although many have compared it to Get Out, it feels more cinematically akin to Jordan Peele’s doppelganger movie about the duality of the American Dream and the sometimes nightmare of our cultural past. Pretty but sterile set pieces mix with the chaotic clutter of desperation and poverty in a jarring cacophony of confusing messages. Shocking red mittens, gold pants, and neutral undertones work against each other to draw the eye. Eerie monkey toys sit waiting on shelve like specters waiting to haunt us. Writer and director Nathanial Martello-White intentionally created an immersive world that is just this side of wrong.

The film opens with a frazzled young black woman named Cheryl(Ashley Madekwe) lamenting how badly she wants a new life. She says she wants “more.” The voice on the other end agrees that everyone does. The newspaper in front of her details black injustices, and bills are piling up on the table. Cheryl is tired of being mistreated at the Housing Assistance office. She thinks they look down on her. She packs a bag while her phone rings incessantly, and a faceless voice growls on her answering machine, “Where are you?”. Cheryl ignores the phone, leaves a note she is going to the hairdresser and walks out of the house onto a loud, busy street.

Flash forward years later, and the same woman, now going by the name Neve is living in an upper-middle-class suburb with her white husband and two children. Her perfectly curated life is designed to draw attention away from her blackness. Her beautiful children attend an expensive private school where she is the Deputy Head Mistress. Everyone knows they are black, and no one cares except for Neve, who clings to her light-skinnedness like a badge of honor. Partly this is due to whatever she faced in her past and partly because of the microaggressions that the well-meaning but ignorant friends and neighbors she interacts with. }You’re practically one of us,” one says to her at lunch. The implication is she isn’t one of them, though.

Her perfect life unravels when she sees a strange black man and woman everywhere. At first, she sees the man in her neighborhood, and later he is hired as a new custodian at her school that takes an interest in her son. Her panic stems from something we don’t quite understand yet. Neve tightly controls every aspect of her life and family.

Her daughter is discouraged from styling her hair in any way that is not white, and her son is shouted out to not talk to the only other black man at school. I’m not sure who does more white-washing, Neve, who has erased everything about her former self, or the neighbors who spend their days preparing for charity events for underprivileged Africans. These new additions to her life, the strays, rattle her. It all comes crashing down at the backyard gala when the man and woman arrive, and Neve snaps.

The back half of the film fills in some but not all of the details of Cheryl now Neve’s life and why she left that day and never looked back. The past always catches up to us no matter how badly we want to forget it. Neve thought she could reinvent herself into the picture she preferred, but our authentic self has a nasty habit of clawing its way to the surface no matter how badly we try to push it down. Here’s everything you need to know about the ending of The Strays, who were Dione and Carl, and what happened to Cheryl and Neve.

The ending of The Strays

Title cards in the film’s last half explain who the two new people that so unsettle Neve are. Their names are Dione(Bukky Bakray) and Carl(Jorden Myrie); they are her children from her previous life. When she was Cheryl, she had a boy and a girl that she left behind when she walked out years ago. She thought she was leaving them with her sister and their father, but neither wanted them. As a result, they grew up feeling unloved and forgotten. They also grew up angry at Cheryl for abandoning them.

These two came to town to destroy Cheryl/Neve’s life. They wiggled into Neve’s new children’s life, partying with Mary and encouraging Sebastian to hurt a teammate. It was all designed to force her to acknowledge what she had done. When she tries to buy them off to go away, they break into her house late at night and terrorize the family. They torture Neve’s husband, Ian, and frighten Mary and Sebastian. They also flood their house and force them to play games and order food as if they were all a happy family. When the delivery man brings them their Chinese food, Neve takes this opportunity to grab her purse and run. She leaves her new and old family behind, presumably to reinvent herself again.

Why did Cheryl become Neve?

Neve tells Ian, Mary, and Sebastian she had to leave because Dione and Carl’s father was abusive. We have no context for that beyond her word. The man leaving the message sounded worried and slightly aggressive, but that could just as easily be worry in his voice. Considering Neve walks out of the door, leaving her new family to defend themselves from the violent and unstable new ones, we must at least question her assertion. Later, when asked again, she says she didn’t want kids back then and was traumatized by both of their births.

The truth is Cheryl/Neve wants the ideal life. She hates her blackness and longs to be wealthy, respectable, and white. Maybe her previous husband was abusive. We will never know, but the one constant in her earlier life as Cheryl and her new life as Neve is she isn’t comfortable in her own skin. The endless scratching of her scalp under her wig and refusal to let her husband touch her hair are indicators that she hates herself. Just before she walks out of the house in both her prior life and her new one with Ian, she looks at herself in the mirror. It is the only time she confronts who she is at her core. She is in love with an idea, not reality. The door closes with all four of her children left, wondering where she is going next.

The problem is when we hate ourselves, nothing is left but ugliness. Cheryl/Neve will never be able to create a persona that sticks because our successes, as much as our mistakes, weaknesses, and failures, make us who we are. She can name herself whatever she wants and pretend she isn’t a terrible person who hates herself, but she won’t be able to avoid the truth. All she has done is build the terrible legacy of violence she was so desperate to squash. The Strays is streaming on Netflix right now.