Tyler Perry’s Straw puts the struggles of a Black single mother on full display, and she navigates trying to make ends meet during a day when it seems like good news is far away.

In the Netflix film, Taraji P. Henson stars as Janiyah, a mother on the brink of losing her mind as she works to take care of her sick daughter despite hurdle after hurdle.

What’s Tyler Perry’s Straw about?
According to an official film synopsis, “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.”

“When humans reach their breaking point, or their last straw, there is always a why. It’s never just, ‘I snapped,’” Henson told Blavity’s Shadow and Act during a previous interview about the new Netflix title. “There’s something that pushes a person. And I’m always interested in that why — what drove this person to do that? And I think once we find that out, then you can show a little more grace or have a little more empathy.”

What pushes her character to the edge?
From the first scene, viewers get a glimpse into some of the troubles Janiyah faces before any dialogue in the film. The camera captures her less-than-ideal living conditions before we see the character begin the day with her daughter, whose health ailments don’t seem to improve as past-due bills pile up.

She goes from being cursed out by a customer at the grocery store where she works to learning that her child is being taken into child protective custody after a report of alleged abuse from the school. To make matters worse, an off-duty police officer goes to extreme lengths to teach Janiyah a lesson during a traffic incident, which leads to her not only being threatened that he will “find a way to blow her brains out legally,” but the female officer who is supposed to be there to serve and protect ignores her colleague’s irate behavior, still writing Janiyah a traffic ticket and impounding her car — a situation she literally cannot afford.

Finally, Henson’s character is fired after coming back from her break two hours late, and when she returns home, she finds all of her belongings on the street due to an eviction from her landlord.

Does she get her daughter back by the end?
The rest of the film follows Janiyah as a fugitive wanted by authorities after a robbery gone wrong at her now-former job, leaving two men, including her boss, killed at the hands of a young woman who is operating in survival mode.

Luckily, no one else is killed throughout the movie’s duration; however, Janiyah does frighten her hostages when she holds up the bank located across the street from the grocery store where she worked because no one there would cash her check.

The big twist of ‘Tyler Perry’s Straw’
By the end, Janiyah sadly learns that her daughter passed due to complications of a seizure that she had that night, one that she warned school officials would happen if they took the child from her care.

This whole time, she hadn’t had these conversations and was in a state of psychosis. Even though her daughter was dead, she woke up the next day as her daughter was still alive, even taking her to school, which is why the school administrator looked at her funny when she “dropped her daughter off” at school that morning.

There’s an alternate flash of officers raiding the bank and killing Janiyah. Still, in the end, she manages to leave peacefully with the one remaining hostage, the bank manager, played by Sherri Shepherd, before she is arrested and placed in the back of a squad car.

Tyler Perry’s Straw is now streaming on Netflix.