Review of "The Cleaning Lady" by The Headless Critic

The Cleaning Lady – 2018
Production by: Olivargo



Alice (Alexis Kendra) is the other woman in a three-way love affair that only two participants know she’s a part of. She knows she’s doing wrong; she even joined a support group to try and build the courage to leave him. Every time he tells her he’s going to take her away with just the two of them she melts right back into his arms. She’s in love, or the best that she understands love. To distract herself Alice befriends a disfigured cleaning lady Shelly (Rachel Alig) in an attempt to do something good for someone else and perhaps feel better about herself. The disfigured Shelly thinks that the beautiful Alice is perfect. Well almost perfect. Nothing that can’t be fixed. The Cleaning Lady’s scars run deeper than her skin as Alice is about to soon find out. It’s beauty versus the beast.

The make-up department disfigures the beautiful Rachel Alig and inserts her in the middle of a love triangle between Alice and the married couple Michael (Stelio Savante) and Helen (Elizabeth Sandy). The Cleaning Lady isn’t just here to mop the hallways, she cleans up all messy situations. A backstory of child brutality brings a quiet but mentally unstable woman who hides in the shadow’s story to light. Young Shelly has some of the most disturbing scenes in the film and the young actress MyKayla Sohn who plays her deserves credit for the role. Over the top, abusive mother Joanna McGrath has just slight shades of Aunt Martha’s level of crazy from Sleepaway Camp in her performance which is meant as a great compliment.

The man who brought us the underrated cult favorite, Jack Brooks Monster Slayer, Jon Knautz directs and co-writes a story with star Alexis Kendra, with a different kind of monster to slay. Alice is in love with a married man. Shelly is in love with how perfect Alice is. The monster to slay is obsession, or should I say, obsession is the monster that slays you. Don’t let the disfigured face fool you, there really is a monster inside.

Playing Now in Select Film Festivals


4 out of 5 Headless Critics