Tyler Perry has long been both praised and critiqued for his portrayals of Black women in pain. His stories are often drenched in suffering, resilience, and redemption. With Straw, however, Perry digs deeper, strips it raw, and hands the spotlight to a performance that may be one of Taraji P. Henson’s most searing roles to date. Little wonder that it has already topped the No.1 spot on Netflix in the U.S.

The story explored deeply the feelings of a  Black woman on the edge:  tired, frustrated, overlooked— and what happens when that last straw finally breaks. The main character, Janiyah (Taraji P.Henson), seems to be holding it all together until, suddenly, she’s not. In one day, the slow burn of emotional exhaustion, societal pressure, and unhealed trauma reaches a breaking point and the consequences ripple far beyond her.

Taraji plays Janiyah with such ferocity and vulnerability that it’s hard to look away. You feel her unraveling in real time. It’s not just another “angry Black woman” narrative, it is a story about the cost of constantly holding it all in. Perry’s script gives her the room to be tired, furious, silent, screaming, and everything in between. And Henson doesn't waste a second of it, even within a short period of days.

In an interview, Henson herself admitted this was a tough role to live inside. “This was a mirror,” she said. “We don’t get to explore what happens when we snap  but everyone has a breaking point.”

The fact that Straw feels so close to the bone is not surprising given her past work with Tyler Perry on Acrimony and I Can Do Bad All By Myself, but this performance moves past dramatics into something unnervingly intimate.

What makes Straw work and hit as hard as it does  is the way it challenges the audience to look beyond the surface. It does not just ask what happened, but why. It forces viewers to sit in the discomfort of mental unraveling, particularly the kind that Black women are rarely allowed to show onscreen without judgment or moral correction.

It also reminds us how important it is to ask people why they’re acting a certain way. There’s always something deeper, and sometimes people just need to feel seen. Detective Kay (Teyana Taylor) did a great job digging into that “why,” and Nicole (Sherri Shepered) gave Janiyah that little bit of humanity she desperately needed.

As Taraji stated in an interview, “Move with grace at all times, ’cause you never know what someone is going through.”

However, there are still a bit of hiccups to the [film](https://www.theguardian.com/culture/2025/jun/06/straw-movie-review-tyler-perry?). Some of Perry’s usual narrative shortcuts are present: exaggerated dialogue that feels unnatural and a few one-dimensional side characters. But those flaws feel almost secondary in the presence of Henson’s performance, which anchors the story with undeniable weight.

If Acrimony was Perry playing with rage, Straw is him reckoning with it. It’s the quietest breakdowns that feel the loudest here, the kind you carry in your chest long after the credits roll, especially with the jaw dropping ending.

This psychological crime thriller is not your usual Tyler Perry flick. It’s darker, heavier, and more honest than we have seen from him in a while.