I just finished watching Tyler Perry's Straw on Netflix, and it reminded me of the movie Breaking (2022). The plot is very similar but Breaking was a real life story about Marine veteran Brian Brown Easley, who had been staying afloat financially through small disability checks from the Department of Veterans Affairs. When his monthly payments stopped coming and he was repeatedly turned away by the VA benefits office, Brown-Easley ended up holding a Wells Fargo bank hostage to demand the $892 in benefits he was owed. The 2017 incident in Marietta, Georgia became a tragic standoff. Both films show desperate people pushed to their breaking point by systems that failed them.
This story follows Janiyah, played by Taraji P. Henson, who's a single mom trying to take care of her sick daughter Aria. From the very first scene, you can tell this woman is barely hanging on. She's working at a grocery store where her boss treats her like garbage, constantly worried about paying rent, and dealing with her daughter's health problems. You immediately feel for her because she's trying so hard to do right by her kid.
Then everything starts falling apart in the worst possible way. Her boss won't give her the paycheck she desperately needs. Child services shows up and takes Aria away because they think some bruises on her are from abuse, when really the kid just fell. A racist cop runs her off the road for no reason. Her car gets taken away. She loses her job. When she gets home, all her stuff is thrown out on the street. I mean, it's just one horrible thing after another, and you're watching this woman's life completely collapse in a single day.
The breaking point comes when these robbers hit her workplace, and one of them knows her name. She panics and kills him. Then her boss blames her for the whole thing, so she kills him too. At this point, I'm thinking this woman has completely snapped, but honestly, I understood why. She's been pushed way past her limit.
She ends up at a bank trying to cash her final paycheck, but she can't find her ID. When she gets frustrated and people see her gun, everyone thinks she's there to rob the place. So now there's this whole standoff situation, and you're watching her get more and more desperate.
But then Perry drops this massive twist, Aria, the daughter she's been fighting for this whole time? She died the night before. Everything we saw with the kid - all the interactions, the school stuff, the CPS visit - it was all in Janiyah's head. She couldn't handle losing her child, so her mind created this whole story where she was trying to get her back instead of accepting that she was gone.
It changes everything you just watched. This isn't really a story about fighting an unfair system - it's about a mother so broken by grief that she lost touch with reality completely. The bank manager Nicole knew the truth the whole time and was trying to help her face it gently.
I have to give credit where it's due - Taraji's performance is incredible. You can feel her pain in every scene, and when the truth comes out, it hits even harder. The supporting cast, especially Teyana Taylor as the detective, brought real heart to their roles. These women felt genuine, not like they were just reading lines.
The movie deals with some heavy stuff about poverty and mental health. Janiyah represents so many women who are carrying impossible loads while everyone around them just expects them to handle it. Her breakdown shows how trauma can completely disconnect you from reality, and how grief can make you do things that seem crazy to everyone else but make perfect sense to you.
What I appreciated about the ending, is that Perry doesn't kill her off. She surrenders peacefully, supported by Nicole and Detective Raymond - two Black women who actually show her compassion instead of judgment. There are even protesters outside standing up for her.
But I have to be honest - this movie was exhausting to watch. Perry has a pattern of putting Black women through absolute hell in his films, and sometimes I wonder if he enjoys it a little too much. Janiyah goes through so much pain and trauma that it almost feels like suffering for the sake of suffering. Every single system that should help her instead makes things worse, and while that might be realistic, it's also really hard to sit through.
I kept waiting for some kind of hope or solution, but it never really comes. Even the ending, while not tragic, doesn't offer much comfort. She's alive, but she still has to deal with her daughter being dead and the people she killed. That's not exactly a happy ending.
The movie also follows Perry's usual pattern where most of the men are either absent or terrible. Janiyah is completely on her own, dealing with everything by herself. It makes you wonder why his stories always seem to punish women while the men just disappear or cause more problems.
I think what bothers me most is that the film shows all these problems - poverty, racism, mental health issues, failing systems - but doesn't really offer any answers. It just puts this woman's pain on display and asks us to feel bad about it. Sometimes that feels less like storytelling and more like exploitation.
That said, the emotional impact is real. The twist shocked me, and the performances made me care about these characters. The movie definitely succeeds in making you feel something, even if what you feel isn't always comfortable.
Straw is the kind of movie that stays with you, but not necessarily in a good way. It's well acted and emotionally powerful, but it's also really difficult to watch. Perry knows how to push buttons and create strong reactions, but I'm not always sure he's pushing them for the right reasons.
If you're in the mood for something that will emotionally wreck you and make you think about social issues, this movie will definitely do that.
Watch on Netflix