Strung review – far-fetched thriller awkwardly mixes Blumhouse and Tyler Perry

There are flashes of low-rent fun to be had here but a busy script makes it feel like a limited series inelegantly cut down to movie length

Strung is a cautionary tale about following your gut. Directed by Malcolm D Lee – the under-heralded virtuoso behind Girls Trip, Barbershop and other fine franchises – the Peacock suspense thriller stars Chloe Bailey as Laila, a classical violinist with her sights set on a seat in the city philharmonic. A substitute music teaching gig leaves that dream feeling farther away than ever until Laila meets Lynn Whitfield’s Audra – who not only offers more stable and lucrative work as a private music tutor for her granddaughter, but also an inside track to the philharmonic.

Of course, Laila is too bright-eyed, too bubbly and too overwhelmed by the opulence she’s suddenly crossed into to see that it’s all too good to be true. Audra’s daughter, Imani (DC Titans’ Anna Diop), is icy and unmoved by this childcare lifeline, even as she’s well into her third trimester. The prized pupil, Zuri (Romy Woods), is a modern problem child: hyper-allergic, emotionally withdrawn and forever hiding behind a Dahomey warrior mask. The pupil’s antisocial behavior, and its eerie echoes of another young Black girl who looms large in Laila’s imagination (her sister, we later learn), is supposed to set Zuri up for the classic killer kid role. But Lee abandons that tension fairly quickly, and instead traces the girl’s quirks back to the murder of her rapper father. It isn’t until Imani’s husband, Marcus (Emily in Paris’s Lucien Laviscount), re-enters the picture – he and Laila hooked up before she was hired to tutor his stepchild in another coincidence, more inconvenient this time – that Strung really starts to get wooly.
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