The only thing better than a good thriller is a thriller with a real twisty twist. You know what I’m talking about. I mean a twist that twists so hard that you practically get motion sickness because you’re so turned around by the end. The new Tyler Perry movie on Netflix, Straw, has such a good twist that the movie’s star, Taraji P. Henson, was even shocked by it.
ICYMI, here’s the official synopsis for Straw: “A single mother’s world unravels in chaos as her day goes from bad to worse to catastrophic as she struggles to care for her ill daughter. Pushed to the brink by a world that seems indifferent to her existence, she’s forced to confront impossible choices in a society that offers her no safety net.”
Taraji plays that single mom named Janiyah who’s pushed to her breaking point (or her last straw, if you will) after everything that can go wrong in one day does. She owes rent to her landlord, she’s fighting with her boss, and CPS is threatening to take away her daughter after bruises are found on her back. Janiyah knows those bruises are just from an accidental slip in the bathtub, but she’s still powerless against all the forces working against her.
By the end of the movie, Janiyah winds up in a standoff with the FBI as she holds up a bank. But how does she get there? And how does the twist ending change everything? Here’s your explainer on the ending of Straw.
What happens at the end of Straw?
Throughout Straw, Janiyah loses custody of her daughter, a racist cop nearly runs her off the road, she gets fired, and all her belongings get dumped on the side of the road by her landlord. Yeah, definitely not a good day for her, to say the least. She also finds herself in the middle of a robbery at her job and somehow winds up with the robber’s gun.
Then, Janiyah tries to cash a check at the bank. But when she’s spotted with the gun, the bank shuts down. Janiyah accidentally finds herself holding up the bank, even though she didn’t mean to. Throughout the whole hostage situation, Janiyah is still begging for help with her daughter. But when Janiyah’s mother, Delores, finally gets in touch with her, she reveals the horrible truth: Aria actually died the night before after having a seizure.
“Reading the script, I was blown away,” Taraji told Decider. “But then it made sense in her actions. Because what it showed me was that she snapped a long time ago. She snapped the day before; she was just on automatic. She wasn’t even in her body, to be quite honest. I just played the honesty of her living the life as if nothing happened.”
It turns out that everything relating to Aria throughout the movie was Janiyah hallucinating as she dealt with the grief of losing her daughter. And there’s one more big hallucination. At the very end, as she grapples with her pain, violence breaks out in the bank. Janiyah is shot amid a cloud of tear gas. But that is simply a hallucination, too. In reality, she’s escorted peacefully out of the bank.
As Janiyah leaves the bank, she sees a crowd standing nearby supporting her. It’s unclear if that’s a hallucination, too, and it looks like it’s left up to the audience to decide that one.
