The Cleaning Lady

 

I kind of-sort of remember seeing the trailer and other things being released back in 2020 when The Cleaning Lady first came out, and I don't think it resonated with me that much. It just stewed in the back of my brain for a brief period of time and then just fizzled away. Now, five years later on Tubi, I run across the fact that it's streaming on the platform and I recalled the cover art and the title-but not much else. It's mainly because the title "The Cleaning Lady" is pretty generic and lethargy inducing at it's highest potential-and I really wasn't to excited about what this chunk of horror really could provide me with. Man, was I fucking wrong. These are the types of films that start pulling on your hair about halfway through, and before you know it you're fucking bald and penniless. I ended up really getting engrossed in what this piece had to offer because the psychology behind it is immense and intense all the same-you know right when this thing starts that something is going to come full circle. You can feel it in your blood that something is highly disturbing about some young woman that puts a bunch of rats in a blender in the opening scene, and pours the remains into a glass dinner bowl. The gums that hold your teeth in place will shake and shiver at the idea of what happened during Shelly's home life because her mother is a fucking greedy, selfish bitch. Your nails will collect more dirt than normal harboring the fact that Alice is a beautiful blonde woman that could have any man that she wanted-but she just had to have some loser that's already married and doesn't know how to let go. All of these things transmorph and coagulate into a story about how deranged a child can become with the wrong parent(s), the wrong time and the wrong situations they find themselves in. I can't stress enough how bad I ended up feeling for Shelly more than I did Alice because what she was involved in, she had brought on herself-whereas what happened to Shelly was because of her mother. I will never understand how empty and soulless you could possibly be to stoop to those levels of disgusting behavior, but unfortunately, we all know what she forces Shelly to do for money when she was a teenager actually happens in life. Christ. The first few moments of The Cleaning Lady showcase Shelly putting a bunch of rats in a blender so she can presumably (what I thought initially) have something to eat. Well, we'll get to it at some point-but the smoothied up rat guts aren't for herself. We then see Alice laying in bed with who it seems like her husband at first, but he's some other woman's husband because he's a cheatin' sonofabitch. Alice calls someone on her phone about fixing her tub because it's clogged. Out of nowhere, Shelly shows up and shows Alice that her tub was ringed up with a massive hairball and that's what was causing the blockage. The film starts grinding it's gears and moving with steam from that point on because they start to form a relationship where Alice is paying Shelly to clean her apartment and Shelly just wants some kind of human connection. Any kind. Shelly starts noticing "imperfections" that Alice garners such as smoking and being in an affair with a married man-and this triggers her and her past with her mother-whom she has chained up in a massive shipping container in the backyard of their house that used to be their home until her mother decided one day to start selling Shelly's body for cash. And you guessed it... that's who the rat guts are for. Karmic food for her mother. Oh, after Shelly's face gets burned by one of her "clients" because he threw a pot of boiling water on her after she bit his hand, she tells her mother that she hates her to her face and she runs to the kitchen to get these massive scissors to cut her tongue out. Yeah. You can see why Shelly became "the cleaning lady". I could really spoil more about what happens in The Cleaning Lady about Alice and Shelly, but I've done enough. There are so many layers to The Cleaning Lady as whole that I just recommend you zits and zombies to watch it. It will surprise the hell out of you.