Review: The Cleaning Lady (2018), a visually impressive and effective chiller

Making a horror movie is quite the challenging endeavour. Sure, Hollywood manages to produce one or two winners per year, but many an indie director has tried to make a disturbing, startling or simply disgusting piece of fiction and failed miserably. This sometimes has to do with budget (producing all that fake gore and blood ain’t cheap!), but in most cases, it’s related to atmosphere and tension; your horror picture can be full of all the blood, guts and godforsaken jump scares you want, but if it feels inert, or if it doesn’t manage to crawl under the viewer’s skin, it’s no use. It’s easy to make a viewer jump; it’s a lot harder to make him feel profoundly disturbed and distressed.

That is why a film like “The Cleaning Lady” can be so satisfying to watch. Directed by Jon Knautz, it’s a stylishly-shot and deeply unnerving glimpse into the disturbed mind of a young woman, and an exercise in tension and the grotesque. It doesn’t linger in its gore —although it is quite explicit from time to time— and it can feel a little bit rushed during a couple of scenes, but the final product is tense enough for it to satisfy even the most demanding horror movie fanatic. This is quite the feat, considering the amount of disappointments the genre churns out year to year.

“The Cleaning Lady” begins with a scene the shows rodents in a blender; this sets the tone and style quite nicely. Alexis Kendra (also the film’s co-writer, along with director Knautz) plays Alice, a beautician who’s trying to end an affair with a married man. She hires the heavily-disfigured Shelly (Rachel Alig), a maintenance worker at her building, as a cleaning lady. The two become friends, which seems to help Alice forget about her problems, despite the fact that she seems to pity Shelly more than anything else. Predictably, though, this will bring problems of its own, which may further complicate Alice’s life.

“The Cleaning Lady” is, first and foremost, a tale of obsession, and in that sense, it works quite well. Shelly’s past is gradually explored, which helps to explain her feelings towards Alice; she wants to make her perfect, maybe to compensate her own physical imperfections. It’s a very unlikely friendship, which somehow manages to feel natural and realistic; the audience can’t help but see their own relationships reflected on the screen. That is the kind of horror movie that stays in the mind of the viewer; the one that strikes a nerve, and relates to something anyone can identify with.

It helps to have such a mysterious character in Shelly. What is her deal? Why does she look like that? What does she want and why? The movie’s first act unspools a little slowly, but things kick into gear during the second —especially the moment her true intentions are revealed— and the movie doesn’t let up. The best thing about Knautz and Kendra’s screenplay is that their explanations about Shelly don’t disappoint; it is sometimes said that the less exposed about the monster, the better. In this case, though, the revelations are interesting enough for them to complement the plot, instead or undermining it.

There are plenty of blood and guts in “The Cleaning Lady”, meaning those who are sensitive to those kinds of images, should probably avoid this one. Some of the gore looks a little off, to be sure, but most of the explicit scenes are quite brutal. Consider, for example, a really tense moment involving a pair of scissors and a tongue, or the aforementioned blender scene. “The Cleaning Lady” uses its gore in the best manner possible: to develop suspense and create a feeling of uneasiness. This isn’t a gratuitous bloodfest, but it’s not a sanitised, PG-13 horror picture either.

Knautz manages to compose a couple of really creepy visuals, which turns “The Cleaning Lady” into quite the spectacle. This isn’t one of those over-edited, hyperactive horror films; Knuts favours long takes and smooth camera moves over choppy editing and excessively shaky shots, which helps to increase the suspense. The creepiest scenes are elongated to almost unbearable levels, and most of the goriest ones are shown in a single take, making the viewer think that maybe Knautz and company will dare to show the entire thing in the most explicit manner (even though that is not always the case). “The Cleaning Lady” seems to know when to be explicit and when to leave things to the viewer’s imagination, something many horror film directors should learn from Knautz and his team.

Yes, the acting isn’t the most polished that I’ve ever seen in an indie production, and yes, the third act feels quite rushed, resorting to a “slasher” movie feel that seems quite less original than what was previously shown, but these faults aren’t significant enough to diminish what Knautz and Kendra have accomplished with “The Cleaning Lady”. Visually, it’s quite impressive, especially considering its low budget (the makeup effects, for example, are unexpectedly believable), but most importantly, it knows that a gradual development of suspense is far more valuable —and effective— than cheap jump scares and loud noises. “The Cleaning Lady” is one of the better chillers that I’ve seen in some time; a twisted story of obsession and “love”.