Movies
[FrightFest Review] Jon Knautz’s ‘The Cleaning Lady’ is Twisted on Every Level
If you had trust issues before, director Jon Knautz’s latest feature, The Cleaning Lady, will only make them worse.
Co-written by Knautz and Alexis Kendra, The Cleaning Lady follows Alice (played by Kendra), a beautician and recovering “love addict” attempting to end a longstanding affair with a married man. She hires Shelly (Rachel Alig), a shy, heavily scarred maintenance worker at her building, to take on some cleaning around her apartment. One night, while seeking to distract herself from her former lover, Alice asks Shelly to stay for dinner. Thus, a very unlikely friendship is born.
At first, the women enjoy each other’s company. However, things take a turn when the troubled housekeeper becomes infatuated with her new companion. Soon, Shelly’s past traumas begin to resurface, causing her to become obsessed with making Alice perfect.
The Cleaning Lady is a title that may not sound extraordinarily interesting, but the film itself is surprisingly refreshing. Both Kendra and Alig do very well with their respective roles and the lines they are given. Behind the camera, Knautz composes both interesting and creepy visuals. The story is relatively straightforward, but manages to remain engaging throughout.
Particularly interesting about this film is the great care taken to give both Alice and Shelly depth when they could have so easily been one-dimensional. Alice is not merely another bubbly, rich lady with an addiction to yoga, just as Shelly is not just a seemingly harmless, penniless maintenance worker. Both are complex, make mistakes, and battle demons. Having a grey area, rather than simply making the women polar opposites, allows us to acknowledge our protagonist is flawed and gives us room to feel sympathy for our villain. This aids the film in toying with the audience’s sense of right and wrong, as well as our expectations, at once situating us on the side of the killer and her victims. The Cleaning Lady has its fun exploring where the line should be drawn between fairness and injustice.
Any film beginning with rodents in a blender (a scene which showcases the oft-overlooked art of sound design) can be classified as grotesque, but The Cleaning Lady is truly disturbing. The kills are extremely violent and decidedly brutal, sure, but it’s Shelly’s abuse at the hands of her mother which implants itself firmly under the skin. We thankfully never see enough to deem the film crass, but we see enough for it to be effective. The film explores toxic relationships in a thoughtful manner while still staying true to the fact that it is, at its core, a horror film.
While The Cleaning Lady mostly works, it’s worth mentioning the ending feels unsatisfying because it is much too abrupt. Adding just a few more minutes of running time would have made the movie feel much more cohesive. A slightly longer version of the film would have allowed some of the loose ends to be tied up, and threads connecting Shelly’s trauma to her crimes to be fleshed out just a bit more. Stronger connections between these ideas would lessen the number of logical leaps the audience needs to make, and would bring a better sense of closure to the film.
The Cleaning Lady is a spellbinding glimpse into the mind of a deeply disturbed young woman. While it may sometimes feel underdeveloped, the film boasts solid technical ability and a sickening story to boot. With The Cleaning Lady, Knautz and Kendra have created a film that is truly twisted on every level.
Judging from the unprecedented box office success of Kane Parsons’ Backrooms adaptation, you’ve likely already seen the liminal horror hit that managed to make audiences afraid of empty hallways and bad wallpaper. And now that so many of us have already entered the yellow labyrinth (some of us more than once), the time has come to discuss the spoiler-filled details that make the movie so fascinating in the first place.
And if there’s one element here that makes the Backrooms movie stand out from any previous lore/mythology, it has to be the genius addition of the Still Life entities. Warped recreations of real people that somehow wandered into the Complex, these misremembered creatures are responsible for some of the most disturbing imagery of 2026 – as well as laugh-out-loud memes created by one of the film’s very own concept artists.
However, true to Parsons’ word that the movie would rely heavily on practical effects, each of these distorted monsters was brought to life by real actors under heavy layers of makeup and prosthetics (with the occasional splash of CGI enhancements). While Anora and If I Had Legs I’d Kick You actress Ivy Wolk wasn’t among these performers, despite what Letterboxd might have you believe, the creature cast did benefit from veteran players with plenty of genre experience.
For starters, Alien: Romulus alumni Robert Bobroczkyi (who previously brought that film’s horrific Offspring to life during its most memorable sequence) plays the flick’s main antagonist, the Still Life version of Captain Clark. And though there was some obvious CGI involved in making the character’s peg-leg and nightmarish face more believable, Bobroczkyi’s monstrous performance and his natural 7’7″ frame helped to make that final chase sequence a clear highlight among this year’s genre offerings.
The film’s Texas-Chain-Saw-inspired “dinner” scene also features a freaky collection of less-aggressive Still Life creatures in the form of the Bearded Man, the Red-Headed Woman and, strangest of them all, the cheekily named “Archibald Leland Sutter Still Life” (who earned this title among fans and crewmembers as a reference to his apparent affinity for lamps).
While this was the first major horror outing for both Patrick Baynham (The Bearded Man) and Dana Mahmood (Archibald), Rhiannon Roberts has worked as a stunt performer in everything from Yellowjackets to HBO’s The Last of Us adaptation – which is probably why The Red-Headed Woman is the most active out of Clark’s impromptu “family.” That being said, the Archibald Leland Sutter Still Life is my personal favorite of the bunch simply because his anachronistic outfit suggests that the Backrooms phenomenon might be a lot older than the Async Foundation. I also love how hard he tries to be helpful with that little light of his!
That might be it for the Still Life entities, but I think horror fans will also be pleased to hear that the film’s Found Footage prologue stars none other than Resident Evil: Welcome to Raccoon City star Avan Jogia as Naren Warne – and American Mary herself Katharine Isabelle also shows up in a blink-and-you’ll-miss-it cameo at Mary’s house party towards the middle of the story (though I have a feeling that she originally had a bigger part that was likely cut for time).
At the end of the day, Parsons’ Backrooms may have been an auteur-driven project motivated by the young director’s unique take on the classic creepypasta, but film has always been a collective artform, so it’s fun to see just how many talented performers it takes to bring this kind of supernatural nightmare to life in a way that connects with so many people.
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