Movie Report: Straw
The line that gutted me in STRAW was,
“People don’t know how expensive it is to be poor.”
That isn’t just a throwaway quote, it’s the film’s backbone! It’s a living, breathing indictment of systems that profit off deprivation. A reminder that being poor costs so much more than money. It costs your dignity. Your relationships. Your health. Your sanity. Sometimes, your life.
From the jump, STRAW tells us exactly what we’re dealing with. We meet Janiyah (Taraji P. Henson) and her daughter Aria (Gabby Glenn) sharing a bed in a studio apartment that feels like it’s on the brink of collapse — walls vibrating from the neighbor’s music at not even 6am, multiple fans running because they don’t have AC. There’s an eviction notice on the table next to unfinished instant noodles. Minimal furniture, mismatched, like it all came from Craigslist’s free section. Every visual screams s c a r c i t y.
When the alarm goes off at 6, Janiyah is already in survival mode. She has to wake up Aria — who’s wearing noise-canceling headphones because that’s the only way to sleep through the chaos — to start the daily grind. Bath time reveals they don’t even have hot water. And Aria’s messing with her science project, a tender little joy. Janiyah tells her to keep it away from the water because she spent her last on batteries and wires for it. The heartbreak of that… having to ration out hope.
Then Aria asks her mom to pay her lunch balance because the teacher embarrassed her in front of the class. Janiyah, holding back the rightful rage, promises she’ll pay it today. A promise loaded with the quiet panic of not knowing if she can.
On their way out, they pass an unhoused man begging for change. Aria points out his missing teeth, in that blunt kid way, and Janiyah — raw with shame and compassion — gives him her spare coins, pleading, “please don’t buy liquor with this.” Only to have the landlord up on the second floor roast her in front of the whole complex: how could she give money to a stranger when she can’t pay rent? Janiyah says she gets paid today, that she’ll be back on her break to pay the rent. The layers of humiliation just keep piling.
Sociological truth here?
Being poor means living in a fishbowl. Everyone gets to watch you struggle and judge your decisions – this is baked into our shame-based, individualistic culture. You’re not allowed compassion, not even to give your last coins to someone worse off. The social surveillance is constant. It’s performative cruelty, propped up by capitalism.
Janiyah drops Aria off at school and catches that judgmental side-eye from the staff — the kind that says: We’ve already decided what kind of mother you are. Then she’s off to her job at the grocery store. It’s the 1st of the month, which means the store is slammed. People stocking up because this is the one day their benefits drop; yet another example of how systems dictate the rhythms of poor folks’ lives.
No one greets Janiyah. Her manager, Richard, just barks at her to get to the register. And then comes the inevitable conflict: a woman tries to buy items not covered by WIC, snaps when Janiyah tells her, calls her a bitch, throws a glass bottle at her. The manager doesn’t defend her. Instead, he pressures her to mop it up. This woman can’t catch a fucking break! Her humanity is invisible to her employer — she’s just a body moving products because this is business, baby.
A coworker checks on her in the back room, offers money for Aria’s seizure meds. It’s one of the rare moments of care. But Janiyah declines — pride, shame, fear of owing someone. Another tax of poverty: the inability to accept help because the strings might be too tangled.
Then she gets the call. Something happened at school. Her heart is in her throat. She begs the manager for time off. He gives her 30 minutes, with blatant threats of termination. Another humiliation: he makes fun of her for asking for her check. As if wanting her earned wages is somehow greedy.
She tries to pull out $40 at the ATM across the street to pay the lunch balance. But the withdrawal would dip her below the required minimum to keep her account open, another absurd rule that penalizes poor people. To actually get her own money, she’d have to wait in a long teller line she doesn’t have time for. It’s death by a thousand bureaucratic cuts.
By the time she gets to the school, she learns that CPS has come. Aria is being taken away for suspected neglect: hunger, poor hygiene, and being constantly cold. Janiyah tries so hard to advocate for herself — explains the two jobs, the asthma, the seizures, that she’s doing the best she can. It doesn’t matter. The state machine moves forward. Aria, terrified, tries not to stress because it could trigger a seizure. Watching them ripped apart is pure devastation. And all Janiyah is left with is the case worker’s business card.
Mental health implication here?
This is a woman who is constantly traumatized. Her nervous system never gets to settle. Chronic stress literally rewires your brain, weakens your immune system, and shortens your lifespan. The film doesn’t give us a DSM diagnosis, but we see it — hypervigilance, depression, probably PTSD. And Aria? Experiencing Adverse Childhood Experiences (ACEs) that we know correlate with lifelong health struggles.
Then comes the traffic stop…
Janiyah’s driving — no doubt replaying everything that just happened — when she gets caught in a road rage incident with an off-duty cop. The cop follows her and side swipes her car, causing her to spin out. Then another officer shows up. And for a second, you think maybe she’ll intervene. The off-duty cop comes back and starts screaming threats, looming over her, literally telling her he would find a legal way to end her life. It’s not hypothetical. It’s a promise. Watching Janiyah freeze, hands trembling on the wheel, is gutting. The female cop merely shushes the raging off-duty cop away, then issues a citation for expired tags, taking the opportunity to impound her car. This is state violence on full display: domination, humiliation, extraction. The “good cop” is still complicit, still enforces the harm, still leaves Janiyah stranded and broke.
Two hours later, Janiyah goes back to work. Fired. Publicly humiliated by the manager. Still denied her check. When she finally drags herself home, everything they owned is on the street in the rain. Evicted. The landlord takes a victory lap in humiliating her. This is how society treats poor Black women — kicks them when they’re already on their knees.
The next day, she tries again to get her check. The manager still refuses. In the middle of their volleying, two guys come in to rob the place. Janiyah just wants her money. In the chaos, she ends up with the gun, shoots one of the robbers dead. Shock sets in. Then the manager blames her — says she set it up because the robber knew her name. (He just read her fucking name tag.) She shoots him, too. It’s an act of pure desperation. She takes only her check, ignoring the pile of cash on the manager’s desk. That tells you everything about her character: she just wanted what she earned.
She stumbles across the street to the bank, blood on her hands, literally. Still dazed, holding the gun, she tries to cash the check. Nicole (Sherri Shepherd), the bank branch manager, tries to meet her there, in her panic, in her collapse. Nicole tries to build a fragile bridge of trust, to calm her, to give her some small taste of safety. You see how conflicted she is — bound by her job’s protocols but pulled by her own humanity. At one point, Nicole even offers to take Aria in as a foster placement while Janiyah faces the fallout. It’s both heartbreakingly tender and impossibly sad. Nicole is trying to keep Aria out of stranger care, trying to protect Janiyah’s bond with her daughter, even knowing the system rarely makes reunification easy. It’s an act of compassion that cuts both ways — because it only exists in a world that’s already failed Janiyah.
Outside, Detective Kay Raymond (Teyana Taylor), the crisis negotiator, arrives. Raymond doesn’t stand there sterile and armored. She uses self-disclosure — talking about her own struggles, being a mother raised by a single mother, being a Black woman trying to navigate this mess, and to build trust with Janiyah. She literally positions herself between Janiyah and the cops, itching to pull the trigger. She argues for Janiyah’s humanity, tries to slow down the machine, to keep it from escalating into a slaughter. Her advocacy doesn’t erase her role in the same punishing system, but it ruptures the total harm for a minute. It gives Janiyah the tiniest slice of dignity in an otherwise undignified spiral.
This is what poverty does.
It chips away at your options until you’re left with none that make sense. It’s not that she “snapped,” she was systematically cornered, day after day, hour after hour. The accumulation of stress, humiliation, and violence — interpersonal and structural — inevitably spills over. Her story is less about individual choices and more about a society engineered to produce these outcomes.
From multiple lenses:
Janiyah’s: A mother trying her damndest, facing constant obstacles, stripped of agency, dignity, and finally, her child.
Aria’s: A kid forced to navigate adult burdens, internalizing shame and fear, trying to stay calm so she doesn’t seize, learning her mother’s stress by osmosis.
Nicole’s: Someone trying to offer relational safety, even offering to keep Aria herself, struggling to hold care inside a system designed to escalate.
Detective Raymond’s: Someone leveraging her tiny sliver of institutional power to slow the harm, to advocate for Janiyah, to use self-disclosure as a radical tactic of trust.
The landlord, manager, banks, CPS, cops: Different heads of the same hydra — enforcing scarcity, punishment, and control.
Why it’s so fucking relatable:
Because how many of us have had to beg for our own wages? Been humiliated by a boss or a landlord? Watched our money disappear into fines, fees, tickets, interest, medical bills? Felt powerless when the system took a loved one through foster care, incarceration, or deportation? Been told our lives don’t matter because we’re “poor” or “irresponsible” or “difficult”?
Because we know:
Being poor is expensive.
Being Black is expensive.
Being a woman is expensive.
Being a mother is expensive.
Being sick is expensive.
And being all of those things at once? It can cost you everything.
STRAW doesn’t offer redemption or neat conclusions. It just lays bare the reality: for people like Janiyah, it’s a miracle to get through the day intact. And sometimes they don’t.
That’s the horror of this film. That it’s not dystopian. It’s documentary-adjacent. It’s real. And it’s all of our business.