There’s a heavy-handed ominousness from the first frame of The Strays. This is Netflix’s new entry into the stuffed category of social horror. Dissonant music plays over a concrete block apartment building in London. Cheryl (Ashley Madekwe), a light-skinned Black woman, appears in distress.

There are bank statements crumpled on the counter and a headline blaring “Black kids betrayed by schools”. There is a mention of credit card debt in a phone call to her sister. And lastly, a voice-cracking lament of wanting more. It’s the mid-2000s, and someone keeps calling Cheryl on her old brick phone. She walks out the door with a duffel bag and a note about going to the hairdresser.

Where is she going? is one of the intriguing questions that are raised by the uneasy, impulsive beginning. She's leaving, but why? The voice on the answering machine seems ominous; who is it? the essential elements of a thriller. Most questions are not satisfactorily or precisely answered, but some are. The debut film from British actor and writer Nathaniel Martello-White pokes at some uncomfortable racial and class divides. It often favors unearned suspense over character growth or insight.

The long shadow of Get Out looms over these haunting stares. It is a thriller predicated on some level of exposure to racism. (A sudden minor car crash and a slow-motion shot of Neve sipping tea played to dramatic effect, for example, feel like direct rip-offs.) But Martello-White’s handle on social horror slips as the 97-minute film backtracks in its second act. It now retells the previous five days through the eyes of Carl (Jorden Myrie) and Dione (Bukky Bakray). They are the figures vexing Neve, who have their own obvious, and over-acted, motivations.

Martello-White has an eye for eerie, fascinating details, such as the garishly smiling monkey toy in the hallway of Cheryl's previous apartment and the way Neve moves Ian's hand away from her face during their sex in order to prevent him from touching her hair. My skin itched from the sound effects of Neve's furious scratching at the edges of her wig as her past tore apart her present.

There’s something provocative and interesting in how severely Neve compartmentalizes her life as a Black woman and, in all but name, a white one, how internalized racism passes down to her children. Madekwe’s performance as a woman cleaved from herself – in accent, voice and posture – and of the psychological violence required to maintain appearances, is disconcerting throughout, though hampered by a clunky script that builds little connective tissue between characters.

The Strays is, thankfully, not a Them situation which perpetuates violence and degradation against Black characters in the name of representation or honesty. (It is also, save for a final act twist, relatively light on violence.) But it also ends up with little to say on the racial divides and dynamics it initially sets up. The final inevitable, overplayed collision between Neve’s family and Cheryl’s legacy goes off the rails, into what amounts to a punchline that undermines its own ambitions for social commentary. It’s an uncomfortable final 15 minutes, stilted and strange, and not in a productive, introspective way. The Strays sets up an intriguing examination of race, privilege and the difficulty of social mobility for Black Britons but, as Cheryl once did, ultimately bails.