The Cleaning Lady review: Single White Female gets a truly horrific twist in this tale of sisterhood turned very, very bad.
The Cleaning Lady review by Kat Hughes.
The Cleaning Lady review
A film that opens with rats being blended alive is certainly one that is demanding your attention. But with such a tough opening sequence to follow, The Cleaning Lady struggles to maintain the same amount of your attention until around the mid-way point.
Once the rats are blended, we join the young, beautiful Alice (Alexis Kendra). She’s a care-free beauty therapist who has a really big problem, her boyfriend has a wife. Complicit, at least to some degree, in the affair, Alice is trying to be a better person. A member of the local lovers anonymous group (yes apparently that’s a thing). Alice is encouraged to dump her super rich lover and freeze him out entirely. Looking for a distraction she strikes an unlikely friendship with her cleaning lady Shelly (Rachel Alig), but little does she realise that she’s going from the frying pan into the fire, as Shelly is far from mentally stable.
The Cleaning Lady review
Films about the dark bonds of friendship, especially those between women, have been doing the rounds for years. With The Cleaning Lady, director Jon Knautz pushes the boundaries and ventures into some very horror-genre areas. Shelly has been left horribly disfigured after a rather grisly accident as a child, and becomes somewhat infatuated with Alice and her perfect ‘Barbie’ image. There are some truly creepy scenes with Shelly stalking around Alice’s house, collecting mementos. The most skin-crawling scene involves a rather different paper-mache project.
The Cleaning Lady review
The true horror of The Cleaning Lady stems not from what is unfolding in the present, but rather from events in Shelly’s past. The misery and torture she is subjected to by her mother makes Carrie’s mum look like a saint. The actions are disgusting and, alarmingly, potentially all too much of a reality for some children. That being said, I imagine that not every survivor of this brand of child abuse goes on to become a deranged psychopath. It’s a trope that horror films cling to far too often – broken child equals murdering (or worse) psycho, and it really needs to change.
Over reliance on a tired cliche aside, The Cleaning Lady still offers the viewer plenty to think on. It’s also got some terrible moments of stomach-churning violence and unease that are very affecting. If you’ve ever watched The Cable Guy or Single White Female, and thought ‘this film is missing some blood and torment’, you’ll certainly enjoy The Cleaning Lady.
The Cleaning Lady review by Kat Hughes, August 2018.
The Cleaning Lady screened at Arrow Video Frightfest 2018.
