Cleaners (2019)

There's a moment in Cleaners where the film shifts gears so sharply you feel it in your chest. One minute you're watching something that borders on student sketch comedy, and the next you're sitting with a story of institutional cruelty and school violence that's so precisely observed it makes your skin crawl. That whiplash is jarring, yes, but it's also what makes this Filipino anthology so hard to shake once it's done with you.

I'll be honest: the opening had me worried. The first segment is built around a grotesque fart and poop joke that feels less like satire and more like a dare to keep watching. I nearly didn't. The second isn't much steadier, a group of disaffected emo teens performing a folk dance with a punk twist. It's bizarre and a little cringey, though I'll admit it has a certain earnest weirdness that's hard to fully dismiss. But pacing is a problem, and if you stumble across Cleaners without knowing what it becomes, there's every chance you switch off before it gets going. That would be a genuine shame.

Because from the third segment onwards, something remarkable happens. The film finds its nerve. What follows is a sequence of tightly written, deeply unsettling stories rooted in the real anxieties of adolescent life in a rigid, unforgiving school system. Bullying, academic pressure, institutional neglect, the quiet violence that systems can inflict on young people without ever raising a fist. The tension builds slowly, almost imperceptibly, and then it erupts. When it does, you feel the weight of everything that's been accumulating. These aren't genre exercises. They feel lived in.

A big part of why is the process behind them. Each segment was developed with actual high school students through improvisation, anonymous submissions, and a method involving highlighter pens to identify the important characters within each story. It's as inventive as it is empathetic, and that authenticity bleeds through every frame. The performances are raw and unpolished in the best possible way. There's no vanity in this filmmaking. It's uncomfortable at times, sometimes messy, but never insincere for a single moment. I think of Mustang and how that film found its power by trusting young people's experiences completely. Cleaners does something similar, though its methods and its setting couldn't be more different.

The film's willingness to take school violence and systemic neglect seriously, to treat them not as dramatic devices but as the lived reality of the students who helped make it, gives the later segments a weight that most films about adolescence simply don't carry. It earns its darkness. And the contrast with those stumbling early segments stops feeling like a structural flaw and starts to feel almost thematically appropriate, the way a school year might begin with something absurd and end with something that changes you.

Is it uneven? Absolutely. The first act is a genuine liability, and I won't pretend otherwise. But unevenness in a film this genuinely unique feels different to unevenness in something that's playing it safe. This is a film taking real risks, made with and for real young people, and it shows both the rewards and the costs of that approach. The cult following it's earned makes complete sense to me now. There's nothing quite like it.

Four stars, and I'd have given it five if the opening hadn't tested my patience quite so thoroughly. Still, see it.

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

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Where to watch

Watch in the UK
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Rent: Amazon Video
Buy: Amazon Video
Physical: Amazon UK · Zavvi

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Buy: Amazon Video
Physical: Amazon US

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