Cleaners (2019)

Glenn Barit's Cleaners arrived in 2019 as one of the more formally audacious Filipino indie productions of recent years, shot entirely in high-contrast black and white on a shoestring budget through Dambuhala Productions, a small outfit operating well outside the Manila mainstream. Barit, whose background was in short-form work before this feature debut, structured the film as a loosely connected anthology set across a single high school, with different segments following different students in the cleaners group. The project sits comfortably within the broader wave of Philippine independent cinema that gathered pace through the 2010s, producing low-budget, festival-circuit films that traded commercial polish for formal experimentation and social candour.

A-Z World Movie Tour Philippines Cleaners is a bold, uneven, and ultimately fascinating Filipino anthology that starts with a stumble but finds its rhythm, and then some. The first two segments, for me at least, don’t land. The opening skit, built around a grotesque fart/poop joke, feels more like a juvenile prank than satire, and the second (a group of disaffected emo teens performing a folk dance with a Punky twist) is bizarre and a little cringey, although it definitely has heart. They’re poorly paced and easy to write off as the film’s weakest moments. But from the third segment onwards, Cleaners transforms. What follows are tightly written, deeply unsettling stories of school violence, systemic neglect, and the quiet horrors of adolescence in a rigid, unforgiving system. Each tale feels rooted in real social anxiety: bullying, academic pressure, institutional cruelty. The tension builds quietly, then erupts. The shift from silly to serious is jarring at first, but once the film commits, it does so with chilling conviction. What makes it truly remarkable is the process: each segment was developed with real high school students, using improvisation, anonymous submissions, and even highlighter pens to mark out the important characters of each segment, a method as inventive as it is empathetic. That authenticity bleeds into the performances and the atmosphere. It’s raw, unpolished, and sometimes uncomfortable, but never insincere. Flawed, but also brave, inventive, and far more powerful than its messy start suggests. A truly unique film, which is a rarity. I can see why it's gained a cult following.

Rating: ★★★½  | Year: 2019  | Watched: 2025-08-18

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