Tina Kakadelis
What does it take for a person to no longer become a stranger? Is it when we invite them into our home? There’s something intimate about that, isn’t there? To allow someone into your home is to let them see the place where you live, the space you have made your own. You can tell a lot about an individual based on their home. If it’s clean, the sort of knickknacks they have, and how they treat you once you step beyond the threshold. Writer/director Anu Valia’s We Strangers sees a woman whose job it is to enter homes and clean, but whose presence sends a ripple through the world around her.
We first meet Rayelle (Kirby Howell-Baptiste) doing what she does through much of the film: walking through the house of a client, cleaning a mess that isn’t hers. Ray, as she’s known, lives in Indiana, works at a commercial cleaning company, and is the glue that keeps the people she loves together. She drives her mother to work (Tina Lifford), takes her nieces to school, and somehow finds time to sleep a little while keeping all the plates spinning. One of Ray’s clients, Dr. Neeraj Patel (Hari Dhillon), asks if she’ll consider cleaning his house outside of the purview of her company. Not one to say no to an extra buck, Ray agrees. This puts her on a path toward thorny suburban drama that’s way over her head.
Those who didn’t grow up in the suburbs might not understand the toxic niceties that exist in culs-de-sac across the United States. Sure, you greet the new neighbor with some baked goods to welcome them to the street, but also to get a closer look at them. So you can start to make judgments about them. Ray is both an outsider and an insider in this world. She’s an outsider because she doesn’t live there, but she does exist in these spaces for hours on end. Ray is an observer, one meant never to be seen or heard. Meant to clean and nothing more. Yet there’s a part of Ray that aches for this suburban life. Not necessarily the white picket fence, but the slower life. No one is oversleeping from dropping their mother off at the grocery store night to work the shift like Ray is.
Ray will take any avenue that appears in front of her to make a little more money. One of the women whose house she cleans (Maria Dizzia) is watching a reality show about psychic mediums, so Ray casually says she can do that too. This woman, Jean, is overwhelmed by their first session and Ray’s seemingly uncanny ability to sense spirits and emotions. The audience, of course, knows it’s all smoke and mirrors. Ray is merely reflecting back what she’s noticed about Jean from her house and their conversations, and that’s enough for Jean to believe her. A desperate person will seek hope anywhere they can get it. We Strangers shows that even though Jean, Ray, and other suburban women Ray meets are different on paper, they’re looking for a source of hope that takes them out of their present predicament. Everyone has troubles, they’re all just a little different.
We Strangers shares DNA with some of the other class-conscious films of recent years, like The Menu, Parasite, and Triangle of Sadness, but takes a more focused route toward code-switching. The Ray we see around her clients is nowhere near the goofy, free person Ray is when she’s around her family. The entire tone of the film switches depending on where Ray is, mimicking the way she also changes. It’s not an outright horror film, and it would be wrong to even really say that it’s a partial horror, but there is an essence of unease that permeates the movie. It comes from the way Ray is pulled between two worlds, how she’s treated in them by people who see her as an equal and those who don’t. The friction also comes from the fact that Ray doesn’t see herself as someone who is lesser, even when the people who have hired her definitely see themselves as better than her. That by hiring Ray they’re doing her a favor, and that’s worth more than the money they’re paying. All of this tension boils over in Jay Wadley’s score and the exquisitely squishy sound design that makes your skin crawl.
Valia has crafted a surrealist take on the isolation that’s born from code-switching. By shifting herself so much to fit what both worlds want her to be, Ray is tearing herself apart. We Strangers unwinds the tightly wound, quietly sinister effects of assimilation in an almost Lynchian fashion to capture a slice of modern, midwestern American life.
