A movie that's too much- Tyler Perry's Straw.

Life is filled with ups and downs. There are certain circumstances that would just come at you all at once, leaving you overwhelmed and feeling like you're being sucked into a bottomless pit. You know you are falling but you don't know when you are going to hit rock bottom. You feel like no one on Earth understands you or your plight. Yeah, that feeling sucks.

It is such feeling that Tyler Perry evokes from his audience when he decided to release Straw. I cannot say fos certain whose sad tale inspired this movie because the emotions evoked by the lead actress (Taraji P. Henson) were so overwhelming that I felt like I was the one going through so much all at once. The movie evokes a lot of sadness that I can consider to be "too much".

How do you explain this rationally, that a young single mom living in a run down apartment, having barely enough to feed herself and her young child, wakes up one morning to a pile of dilemmas coming at her all at once, like a sack of dirty laundry.

Picture this.....

She wakes up, prepared to go to work as usual but her landlord is threatening fire and brimstone at her because of her overdue rent? Then at work, her employer's reluctance to pay her as at when due despite seeing that she was in a mess spiked up her trauma. Then on her way from her daughter's school she encountered an over-active police officer who was so petty he could not let go of a small slip up on the road.

Then after work, there came some robbers who wanted to act smart by calling her name, making it look like they were acquaintances, when all she wanted was her pay check.

That's not all....

How do you explain her ordeal at the bank? For several hours, she was misunderstood as a robber and a bomber, when all she wanted was to cash her check. How do you explain all these happening to one frail young woman in less than 24 hours. I don't know what Tyler Perry was thinking but the emotions from watching straw really hit hard.

If you have seen the movie, I'm sure you will agree with me that it was a bit too much. The grief, the sorrow, the psychological trauma and pain was just so unbearable. I was watching this movie and the only way to escape that bottomless pit of sorrow was to cry. I didn't choose to shed tears, no, but I found my eyes betraying me and my cheeks getting wet. Soon, i became an emotional wreck as i couldn't fight back the pain in my heart especially at the scene where she was narrating her story in the bank unbeknownst to jer that she live.

Taraji delivered on the emotional part so well that I could hardly for a moment separate her acting from real life. I felt like she was living ten people's hellish life all at once. That was how overwhelmed I was.

Irrespective of the overwhelming feelings I felt, I state firmly that the movie hit home with me. The whole story plot is very relatable to some of my real life situations and I felt like Tyler Perry used some sort of mirror to reflect a part of my life when I was down and in despair.

I saw the tears of Janiyah (Taraji) and I saw myself in her. I saw a part of my life in her that I don't like to talk about because it was not a sweet phase and probably not worth remembering in detail.

I saw her need to grasp onto a reality that wasn't so harsh. She searched for just one person to believe in her and when she found not one but two wonderful souls who believed in her, ready to stay grounded with her, she was set on her path to healing and recovery.

I don't really like watching sad movies but sometimes I feel like I have this affinity to such movies . Maybe these kind of movies make me so empathetic, just maybe.

Ialso tthink such movies help me appreciate the sweet people who were there for me. Those who didn't lock down on me while I was down rather their helping hands were like anchors helping me to rise faster from the cold grounds of despair. This is what the movie reminds me of.

I rate this movie a 9/10 for its too much sadness and expressions of hopelessness yet the lesson learnt is that no matter how dark a tunnel, there's light at the end it.

Thank you all for reading. You can participate [here](Cine TV Contest #142 - Movie That is Too Much https://peakd.com/hive-121744/@cinetv/cine-tv-contest-142-movie-that-is-too-much)

Images are screenshots.