Stories about the people who take care of other people’s homes have been drifting into the center of film culture for a while now. It makes sense. When you look around at a world bent by wealth gaps and uncertain jobs, the work that happens behind the closed doors of tidy houses starts to feel like a mirror. Think of how audiences rallied around Parasite or the way Nanny pulled a horror thread out of everyday labor. Into that evolving conversation comes We Strangers, the feature debut of director Anu Valia, who many will know from her work on She Hulk Attorney at Law. Her film is a satire with a serious spine, a drama that leans into the quiet costs of cleaning for a living, not only the physical effort but the emotional load that piles up after the vacuuming is done.
At the heart of the story is Rayelle Martin, called Ray by everyone, brought to life by Kirby Howell Baptiste. Ray cleans offices for a living, the sort of person who knows how to make things sparkle when everyone else has gone home. One of her clients is Neeraj Patel, played by Hari Dhillon. After seeing how good she is at her job, he brings her into his personal world and asks her to take care of his home. That introduction opens a door she did not expect. In Neeraj’s neighborhood she meets Jean, Maria Dizzia, who quickly hires Ray as well. Two homes, two sets of keys, two families with a whole lot of unspoken needs.
It starts with a simple opportunity. Ray sees a chance to make more money. There is nothing complicated about that desire. She is ambitious, but not in the glossy motivational poster way. She wants to get ahead, to shore up her life and, importantly, support the people she loves. That hunger for a little more, that edge of just getting by, becomes the engine of the film. It also nudges her to say something she probably should not say. Jean makes a comment while Ray is cleaning. She says she is into the mystical, the idea that someone else might help her shape the world to her wishes. That is when Ray, perhaps without planning to, claims a gift she does not have. She tells a small untruth. She says she can sense things. That she is open to visions. Not a shriek of the supernatural. Just a suggestion that she can read a room all the way down to its bones.
From that moment, Ray’s job quietly changes. She is not only washing floors and folding laundry. She becomes a vessel for her clients’ desires. Jean leans on her. So does Tracy, Sarah Goldberg, the very reserved wife of Neeraj. Ray begins to offer readings, soft touch sessions where she shares insights that sound like they float in from someplace beyond the ordinary. But here is the trick. She is not conjuring shadows. She is observing, paying attention to the details that most people spill without knowing it. A stray receipt. A shift in tone. The tension that hums in a room when two people are avoiding the same subject. She folds those details into advice that feels like prophecy. It is a clever little hustle and, for a while, it pays.
The more she steps into this role, the more people confide in her. The more they unburden themselves. There is power in that, and affection too, but also a strange kind of heat. You can see why a person might crave it and why it could singe everything around it. Her clients begin to act on her words. At first, their moves are small. Then they are not. Decisions get reckless. Choices spiral. The lives she touches start to wobble. Those ripples are not contained within the clean edges of the houses she tends. They spill into Ray’s own life, and there the cost becomes clear.
Ray is not alone in the world. Her mother, played by Tina Lifford, is a steady presence who carries her own needs and history. Ray’s dear friend Mari, played by Kara Young, relies on her too, sometimes even for childcare. The more Ray juggles the emotional upkeep of her clients, the more she drops what matters at home. There is a line late in the story, a party scene where a stranger asks what Ray does. She says she is a therapist. It is a wry, sad joke and also the plain truth of her current identity. She listens. She tells people what they think they want to hear. She absorbs their struggles. The film sits with the way that labor takes more than time. It takes space inside your head. It takes energy away from your own ability to breathe.
Anu Valia sets this story in and around a community that bears a resemblance to the places she knew growing up near Gary, Indiana. There is a gap between the world Ray comes from and the world where she works. She can pass through the gates but only as a specialist who keeps things tidy. That makes the film’s social angle feel grounded. Ray is not the noble working class hero that some movies construct. She is strategic. She is also impatient. When a door cracks open, she pushes. Her ambition is not polished. It can be crass. That grit is part of her reality. It is also what makes the film’s gamble interesting. If your clients want to believe in something, and it is within your reach to sell them that belief, what would you do. What would you risk.
Visually the film has a dreamy glow that contradicts the rough edges of the story. Charlotte Hornsby is behind the camera and her work has a floating, imagistic quality. Not every image lands the same way, but many of them linger. There is a scene where Ray drifts into dancing in a club, hips loose, lights washing over her. It feels like a small release valve opening for a moment. Another image tints the world through a sheet of rainbow plexiglass while Ray watches over Mari’s kids. The colors distort and shimmer. You can feel the invasive beauty of the wealthier lives Ray cleans, and the low grade fantasy that attends them. These sequences give the film a texture that feels generous, if sometimes a little elusive. You can understand why. Beauty can distract, even for a filmmaker. Sometimes it does here. At points you may wish for sharper lines around the story when the images soften the edges.
Throughout the film, images of a mountain range recur. At first, they are puzzling. Forests and jagged stone. Quiet and distant. They do not obviously connect with mops and mirrors and whispered secrets. Later, their meaning steps forward. The mountain evokes a story from the early twentieth century. Ludger Sylbaris was a prisoner who survived the eruption of Mount Pelee in 1902, shielded by the very cell that held him. The film draws a line between his survival and Ray’s own situation. It is an ambitious metaphor. The mountain becomes a symbol of endurance, of punishment that protects, of isolation that can somehow save. It is also heavy. The comparison is offered more than once. It asks the audience to pick up a lot. For some, this will feel profound. For others, it may feel like a weight the movie keeps pressing even when the story could have said the same thing in a far simpler way.
The questions it raises are worthwhile though. Is Ray’s work the mountain, eroding her resolve piece by piece as wind and time carve rock. Or is the mountain the system itself, the structure of money and class that cages her while keeping her alive. The film seems to say both. If you feel the metaphor pulling in two directions, that is because it is. That tension is built into the design. Whether it illuminates or obscures will depend on what you bring into the theater and how much symbolic freight you like to carry.
The plot builds toward a pinch point. Ray cannot keep balancing it all. The borrowed authority of pretending to see the future is a delicate thing. It bends quickly under pressure. When her clients are drawn into behavior that hurts them and when the people she loves suffer for the attention she spends elsewhere, Ray has to choose what she values. Money today or the kind of life she could stand to live tomorrow. The film wants us to sit in that discomfort with her. It does not hurry to resolve it. The pacing is unhurried by design. The path she takes cuts between a need to survive and a desire to be someone who does not sacrifice herself for every bill.
On the level of performance, the cast is tuned and compelling. Howell Baptiste gives Ray a quiet heat, a steadiness that masks how much she is constantly calculating. There is kindness in her, and a little mischief, and a deep fatigue. She lets small expressions do big work. Maria Dizzia plays Jean with a bright edge, someone who wants to be seen as open minded and worldly while also yearning for control. Sarah Goldberg as Tracy embodies a particular kind of reserve. You can see how much she keeps back. Hari Dhillon’s Neeraj seems solid at first glance and becomes more complicated as the story curls around him. Tina Lifford, as Ray’s mother, brings gravity with few words. Kara Young’s Mari feels like the friend you call late at night when you need someone to tell you the truth without breaking your heart. The ensemble holds the film together when its ideas threaten to flutter off.
The film’s craft is confident in many places and uneven in others. The lighting glows. The compositions can be painterly. The editing favors patience. There are long looks. Spaces to breathe. You can feel the respect for stillness. That patience sometimes slips into vagueness, especially when the film leans on the mountain and other metaphorical gestures instead of sharpening the beats of the story. When Ray’s choices sting, the movie is at its best. When it airs out its big symbols, the ground can feel slick underfoot.
One of the most striking things about We Strangers is how it frames emotional labor. The phrase can sound academic. Here it is not. It is a very practical account of what it costs to hold other people’s feelings for pay. Ray starts by scrubbing kitchens. She ends up holding secrets. The authority she claims is theatrically spiritual, but underneath that mask is a worker who has learned to read people so well that it looks like magic to those who are not paying attention. That is the dark irony at the heart of the film. She performs insight for those who do not see her. She looks right through them because they barely look at her. In that imbalance there is power. There is also hazard. It is hard to be someone else’s mirror without losing sight of yourself.
The story pokes at questions of agency too. If Jean and Tracy act on Ray’s words, are they still choosing. The film suggests that they are. Ray does not hypnotize anyone. She suggests. She nudges. She opens doors that were already cracked. The people who step through do so because they want to. That is both the reason Ray’s con works and the reason it cannot last. Pretending to be a conduit for fate is a role that frays the longer you wear it. People want to believe until they want someone to blame.
It is worth coming back to the film’s setting and class dynamics because they give the story its charge. Ray labors in houses that shine. She returns to a life where time and money are always slipping away. She moves between those worlds like a ghost. That awareness, the way she exists inside and outside wealth, is what lets her see what others miss. It is also what sets her apart. You can feel how lonely it is to be essential and invisible at the same time. The film does not hammer that point. It lets the feeling creep in at the edges. That restraint is welcome even when the larger metaphors grow dense.
If there is a place where We Strangers stumbles, it is in the way its parts refuse to lock cleanly into place. You can sense the movie Anu Valia is reaching for. Playful and sharp. Soulful and unsparing. Some of those notes land with clarity. Others blur. Ray’s hunger for advancement, a defining trait that propels everything, sometimes registers as a sketch instead of a fully shaded portrait. You may wish the script dug deeper into the why of her gambit instead of simply showing us the what. The film confides in images when we need more story. It experiments. That can be exciting. It can also push the narrative out of focus right when the themes beg to be sharpened.
None of this erases what the film gets right. The scenes that allow Ray to be funny and tired and cunning all at once feel true. The moments where she connects with her mother and with Mari ground the film in a lived in reality. The performances are committed. The direction shows taste and ambition. There are flashes of something undeniable, a voice that will matter as Valia keeps making work. Even the mountain, for all its heaviness, shows a filmmaker willing to try to say something large about survival and the ways confinement morphs into protection.
Does the ending satisfy. That will depend on the viewer. The climax does not explode. It lands softly, perhaps too softly for some. The film settles rather than soars. For a story that spends so much time managing other people’s storms, that choice makes a kind of sense. Ray does not get a fireworks finale. She gets a reckoning that is quieter and less tidy. She has to decide who gets her attention and what each hour of her life is worth. That is not an easy answer. It should not be.
We Strangers belongs to a moment when audiences are ready to think about what service work carries and what it costs to make other people comfortable. It extends the conversation without closing it. It peeks behind the door and asks us to notice who keeps things in order. It asks us to think about the bargains we make with ourselves when the rent is due and the world feels tilted toward those who have more. It ventures into myth to make its point, and then returns to rooms that smell like lemon cleaner and coffee. If the film sometimes tries to do too much, it also refuses to do too little. It pays attention to a worker who spends all day doing the same for everyone else.
In the end, that attention is the gift the film offers. Ray is not a saint. She is not a villain. She is a person making a risky choice under the pressure of daily life. She stumbles. She improvises. She reaches for a version of herself that looks better in the eyes of people who barely see her. She learns what it costs to hold that mask in place. The story leaves her on the edge of something that looks like honesty. It leaves us with the image of a woman who knows that listening is labor and that telling people what they want to hear can twist into its own trap.
Anu Valia’s first feature does not arrive fully polished. It does not need to. It arrives with a point of view and a willingness to blur the line between a job and a calling, between cleaning a house and cleaning up a life. It offers a look at emotional work most films treat as background noise and places it where it belongs, right in the center of the frame. That is worth watching, even when the mountain looms a little too large. Even when the pretty light distracts. Even when the ending takes the quiet way out. Because beneath the ambition and the missteps is a story that sees the person who holds the keys, who flips off the last switch at the end of the night, and who goes home carrying more than a paycheck.
