The Cleaning Lady directed by Josh Knautz, starring Rachel Alig and Alexis Kendra is a nasty little movie. Coming across really underrated horror movies like this is basically the mission statement for this whole page. Based on the poster alone I would never have watched this, but for the slasher sub-genre it's a very strong movie and achieves exactly what it set out to do.
The story is that Alexis Kendra's character Alice is a recovering sex and love addict who hires a cleaning lady named Shelley who is extremely socially awkward and scarred in every conceivable sense of the word, from her visibly burned face to her blackened broken heart.
Rachel Alig plays Shelley with a quiet vulnerability that's at first almost endearing, on the rare occasions that she speaks she's monosyllabic and softly spoken but underneath her passive demeanour there is an undercurrent of cold blooded menace.
The film has a tone that makes it stand out against others like it,
and Rachel Alig's performance accounts for a large portion of that, ninety percent of the film is only what I can describe as awkwardly intense. The interaction between the two leads is what creates this unnerving atmosphere, being as Alice is suffering from co-dependency issues it makes sense that she befriends Shelley while ignoring all the glaring red flags that would alarm most people. The conversations between the two are purposefully stilted and unusual and as the audience we know that the threat of extreme violence is always present.
I can't actually fault the movie because it knows exactly what type of film it is and it isn't afraid to go to some horrendous places.
I can easily recommend the cleaning lady to any fan of the slasher sub-genre, it's more of a slow burn than most but it has it's own unique fingerprint and feel which I really enjoyed.
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