Cleaners (2019)
★★★½ — Cleaners (2019)
Cleaners arrived in 2019 as something of a quiet anomaly in Philippine independent cinema: a low-budget, black-and-white anthology film set almost entirely within the walls of a high school, made by Dambuhala Productions with a cast of young, largely unknown actors. The premise sounds simple enough, a group of students assigned to the school cleaning committee find themselves confronting the gap between the ideals of cleanliness and purity they are expected to embody and the rather messier reality of adolescent life, but the film works across several separate segments, each focusing on different members of the group, different pressures, and different kinds of social and moral dirt. Shot in a crisp monochrome that feels both nostalgic and clinical, it runs at a lean 79 minutes, though it packs in a good deal more than that runtime might suggest.
Glenn Barit directs, and Cleaners represents a distinctive entry in his filmography, one that drew considerable attention on the festival circuit and earned the film a reputation as one of the more genuinely unusual things to emerge from Filipino indie film in recent years. What sets it apart from the usual coming-of-age fare is the production process itself, which involved real secondary school students in the development of the material, drawing on improvisation and anonymous personal submissions to shape each segment. The result is a film that wears its collaborative, community-rooted origins on its sleeve, for better and for worse. For fans of Philippine independent cinema, it sits in an interesting space alongside other local films that have found international audiences, including I'm Drunk, I Love You and Outside, though it is a rather different animal in tone and ambition.
The ensemble cast, headed by Ianna Taguinod, Leomar Baloran, Julian Narag, Carlo Mejia, and Gianne Rivera, brings a naturalistic, unguarded quality to the material that professional polish might actually have worked against. These are performances that feel lived-in rather than constructed, which suits the film's rough, immediate aesthetic. The comedy-drama blend the film attempts is an awkward tightrope to walk, and not every segment manages it with equal confidence. Whether Barit's patchwork approach, switching registers from broad humour to something considerably darker and more unsettling, holds together as a coherent whole is precisely the kind of question that divides audiences on a film like this. It is a genuinely divisive piece of work, which is rarely a bad thing. Fans of the kind of drama that refuses easy resolution, the sort of thing that turns up in Yi Yi or Mustang, may find much here that rewards patience.
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.
For me, that cult following feels entirely earned, even if it will never be a film for everyone. The rough edges are real, but so is the conviction behind them, and there is something genuinely rare about a film that trusts its young collaborators enough to let the uncomfortable stuff breathe rather than smoothing it away. If anything, the messy opening makes the film's harder-hitting moments land with more force, because you genuinely did not see them coming. I'll be thinking about some of those later segments for a while. Sometimes the films that trip out of the gate are the ones worth sticking with.
Rating: ★★★½ | Year: 2019 | Watched: 2025-08-18
Trailer
▶ Watch the official trailer for Cleaners (2019) on YouTube
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