Strung Review: This Horror-Thriller is Just Baffling

Strung is a mess from top to bottom. From its bizarre script by Alan McElroy to its off-putting direction from Malcolm D. Lee, Peacock’s latest film is a misfire. The main issue is that it constantly feels like a cheap parody of a modern thriller, operating as something that belongs deep in the catalogs of bargain-bin entertainment rather than on a major streaming service.

Strung Review

The narrative stumbles on its premise alone, relying on a dated and overused horror trope. Chloe Bailey stars as Laila, a talented violinist haunted by a mysterious death in her past. Her life takes a turn when she takes a job as a music tutor, quickly finding herself intertwined with an enigmatic, wealthy family that threatens her safety and her sanity.

The main beats of Strung rely on recycled tricks pulled from far better films: children wearing strange masks, opulent environments hiding dark secrets, and women acting uncommonly cold to each other for no reason other than to artificially force an eerie atmosphere. It’s one of the many ways the production feels like a parody rather than a sincere, standalone piece of art.

It doesn’t help that the film’s lead gives a performance better suited to a Disney Channel original movie than to a psychological thriller. Chloe Bailey feels awkwardly stunt-cast into a role that requires immense vulnerability, fear, and profound unsettlement. Instead, she’s unable to muster up anything more than slight amusement at the bizarre happenings around her. Her flat reactions become funny to watch on your own, provided you stop trying to take the narrative seriously.

What makes the film’s failure even more disappointing is the squandering of its supporting ensemble. We have powerhouse talents like Anna Diop and Coco Jones attached to this project, yet the screenplay treats them as mere background decoration rather than characters with agency.

Lynn Whitfield tries her best to inject some classic, icy matriarch energy into the proceedings, but she’s continuously undermined by the absurdity of Alan McElroy’s dialogue. It’s a predictable byproduct of a bizarre production mashup between Blumhouse and Tyler Perry’s studio, resulting in a tonal tug-of-war where neither side wins.

One minute it wants to be a sleek, high-end psychological thriller, and the next it descends into a melodramatic soap opera with cheap-looking production values. This lack of structural identity leaves a capable cast stranded in a narrative vacuum, desperately searching for a movie that doesn’t exist.

As the stakes rise and the twists turn rapidly, Strung goes from boring to outrageously stupid. It becomes entertaining enough to watch with a few friends over a bottle of wine, but it forces you to ask what the point of this project is supposed to be.

Is it meant to serve a specific niche of low-brow horror entertainment with weird sexual overtones and by-the-numbers pacing? If so, the biggest hurdle is its bloated runtime. For some ungodly reason, this nonsensical story takes up almost two hours of your time, dragging out basic reveals until the audience is checked out. And worse yet, the film would’ve been so easy to cut down if a decent editor had been attached. The story has enough bloat to be trimmed into a lean 90-minute, Tubi-quality thriller, but instead it takes itself so seriously that it winds up drawing ire.

I can only imagine that, at this point, directors like Malcolm D. Lee are hired not because their films are decent, but because they can deliver a product cheaply and with a bit of surface-level loudness that’s easy for streaming algorithms to digest.

Is Strung worth watching?

But with a plot that makes no sense, banal and confused performances from a supporting cast that includes Lucien Laviscount, and a director who has no idea what kind of story he’s trying to tell, Strung ends up being a bothersome mix of bad choices. It’s a film too long to be an exciting, fast-paced piece of trash, yet nowhere near serious enough to be considered a good horror film.

Strung is streaming on Peacock now.

Strung Review: This Horror-Thriller is Just Baffling