If *Cleaner* were just another hostage thriller with eco-terrorists and corrupt CEOs, it might have passed unnoticed beneath the smudged windows of a crowded genre. But Martin Campbell directs this skyscraper siege with a bruised soul, and Daisy Ridley, a haunted window cleaner with combat instincts and a battered sense of duty, drags the film to an emotional highwire. What starts as a harrowing protest gone wrong becomes a tense, improbable, strangely intimate survival story between a woman, her vulnerable brother, and the city looming below.
Ridley’s Joanna “Joey” Locke doesn’t come out swinging. She comes dangling, suspended between glass and trauma, having survived an abusive childhood by climbing out through the walls. Now an ex-soldier and caretaker to her autistic brother Michael, Joey scrapes by cleaning windows at One Canada Square. That quiet routine shatters when Michael wanders inside during an environmental gala and walks into a hostage crisis led by Earth Revolution, a splintered activist group long on idealism but short on unity.
Clive Owen, all jagged gravity, plays Marcus Blake, the group’s conflicted leader. He wants exposure, not carnage. But his lieutenant, Taz Skylar, in a raw, roiling performance, quickly hijacks the mission. Noah is part nihilist, part messiah complex, all ticking time bomb. When he guns down the company’s duplicitous CEO and starts forcing public confessions at gunpoint, it becomes clear: he’s not interested in cleaning up the planet—he wants to punish everyone standing on it.
Campbell, a genre craftsman who never wastes a good corner, directs the action with sharp vertical focus. The building becomes a maze of echoes and barriers—glass confessions, concrete guilt. Joey, left outside in the chaos, must claw her way back in not just to save the hostages but also to protect Michael and scrub away her own shame. Her SOS flare is one of the film’s simplest but most affecting beats: a military signal from a civilian in freefall.
Ruth Gemmell’s Superintendent Hume is no stock commander. She’s precise, skeptical, and barely suppressing the panic behind protocol. Her rapport with Joey lends *Cleaner* an unexpected emotional intelligence. Hume doesn’t bark orders—she calculates risk. When she gambles on Joey’s insider knowledge rather than breaching it early, she gives the film breathing room for tension to build rather than detonate.
What makes *Cleaner* sing isn’t the violence—it’s the silence in between. Michael’s quiet decoding of Noah’s past broadcasts (Matthew Tuck is superbly understated) becomes a turning point in exposing a villain and the false purity of rage. Joey’s final confrontation with Noah is less about fists than releasing blame, even if it takes a fall to do it. Their brutal fight near the shattered window is heart-stopping, not because of who will win, but what either stands to lose.
Cinematographer Eigil Hensen keeps the city both oppressive and gorgeous. London’s skyline looms with sterile beauty, the buildings’ glass reflecting the lives within and the consequences spilling out. The movie may be claustrophobic, but it never feels static—each floor reveals new tension and new traps. And behind it all, the score murmurs a nerve-frayed lullaby, equal parts tension wire and elegy.
The film’s politics are blunt, but not preachy. Agnian Energy isn’t just evil—it’s rot made bureaucratic. The confessions, the cover-ups, the internal executions—all of it reads like a dossier rewritten by ambition and fear. Yet *Cleaner* doesn’t pretend activism is simple either. It interrogates where protest ends and terrorism begins, and whether truth means anything if delivered with a body count.
The ending lingers most: not Noah’s fall, but what comes after. Joey and Michael retreat, quietly, to a coastline that doesn’t forgive but at least forgets for a while. It’s a fitting coda to a film less interested in heroism than healing, and how some of us are forced to climb, not to ascend, but survive.
Letter grade: **A–**. A thriller that leaves a mark not with blood, but with fingerprints on glass. You don’t just watch *Cleaner*—you leave it still catching your breath. Let me know if you’d like a version in a slightly more stylized tone or adapted into a feature profile. I’m here for all rewrites and rewatches Streaming on Max.
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