Cleaner (2025 film)

Cleaner is a 2025 British action thriller film directed by Martin Campbell, written by Simon Uttley, Paul Andrew Williams, and Matthew Orton, and starring Daisy Ridley, Taz Skylar and Clive Owen.
The film was released in theatres in the United States on 21 February 2025, and is set to be released in the United Kingdom on Sky Cinema in April 2025.
Joanna "Joey" Locke and her older brother Michael have grown up in a London household with a abusive father, which forced Joey to take to wall-climbing to escape the domestic violence. Twenty years later, as an adult and former soldier who quit after beating up a misogynistic squad mate, Joey is forced to look after Michael, who is autistic and crusading online against corruption at his care homes. One day, she is forced to take him to her workplace at One Canada Square, Canary Wharf, where she works as a window cleaner.
While Joey cleans windows on the highrise alongside her colleague Noah, Michael slips away at an unguarded moment in an attempt to join her. Amidst a shareholder gala held by the Agnian energy company in the building, an environmental acitivst group naming itself Earth Revolution, of which Noah is a member, executes a violent takeover using sleeping gas canisters and taking Agnian's administration, including company owners Geoffrey and Gerald Milton, and guests hostage. Markus Blake, the group's leader, is intent on exposing Agnian's hypocrisy, as the company is promoting environmental exploitation and pollution, contrary to its publicly declared goal of switching to cleaner, renewable forms of energy, and has even murdered arrested members of the group before they could testify in their trials. When Geoffrey tries to parley with them, Noah kills him despite Blake's orders, and Gerald runs off to hide. After the fugitive is cornered, Noah, who disagrees with Blake's idealism, murders him and his loyalists, usurps leadership of the group and rigs the hostages with explosives fitted with a dead man's switch synchronized to Noah's heartbeat.
Joey and Michael just barely escape being knocked out, but Joey is stuck on the building's facade. Her use of a SOS fire signal alerts the terrorists to her presence, but they leave her outside, believing her neutralized. As the police surrounds the building, Noah forces the hostages to record confessions about their crimes for Agnian or their complicity in them, and coerces Joey into framing herself as a terrorist, focussing the authorities' attention on her for the moment. Claire Hume, the leader of the police task force, luckily doubts appearances and allows Joey to contact her, thus learning about the actual situation. After Hume vainly tries to negotiate with Noah, she reluctantly gives Joey permission to infiltrate the building and create an opening for the SWAT teams' assault.
Noah tries to murder Joey by lowering an explosive charge down on her position, but she barely escapes and has Hume shoot several holes into the building's bulletproof glass windows, allowing her entry with Michael's help. Noah sends some of his men after them, but Joey and Michael kill them and seize their weapons. After taking over the control room, and seeing one of Noah's old antihumanist Youtube video clips in which Noah announces his intention of blowing up the building and the hostages, Michael feeds it into the internet, exposing Noah's crusade as a farce, and transfers the forced confessions to a USB drive.
After sending Michael downstairs and telling Hume to send her men in, Joey lures Noah to her in order to disable the bomb trigger. While the commandos secure the hostages, Joey and Noah face off in a brutal brawl near a hole in the facade caused by the earlier explosion. During their fight, Joey swipes the trigger device from Noah's wrist and attaches it to her own, then pushes Noah out of the blast hole to fall to his death. After the police clears the building and a short debriefing with Hume, Joey reunites with Michael; they use the information on the drive to expose Agnian's corruption to the world, and retreat to the coast for some quiet time together.
The film was directed by Martin Campbell and produced by Anton, with Sebastien Raybaud and Callum Grant as producers.
In May 2023, Daisy Ridley was confirmed in the lead role. Later that month, Clive Owen joined the cast. In October 2023, Taz Skylar joined the cast.
Principal photography was reported by Screen Daily to have started in London in September 2023. First look images from Ridley filming in London appeared in the media in October 2023.
Sky Original Film acquired the rights to the film with plans for an early 2025 release on Sky Cinema. The film was released in the United States on 21 February 2025, by Quiver Distribution.
On the review aggregator website Rotten Tomatoes, 51% of 69 critics' reviews are positive, with an average rating of 5.6/10. The website's consensus reads: "Daisy Ridley's credible action chops and Martin Campbell's smooth direction keep Cleaner from being a mess, but this thriller borrows one too many elements from better predecessors to have a polished identity of its own." Metacritic, which uses a weighted average, assigned the film a score of 52 out of 100, based on 16 critics, indicating "mixed or average" reviews.
Frank Scheck of The Hollywood Reporter gave the film a positive feedback and wrote, "Director Campbell clearly knows his way around this sort of material, resulting in some tense, well-staged action sequences that make Cleaner reasonably diverting for its concise running time."
Robert Kojder of Flickering Myth rated the film a rating of 3/5 and said, "This film deserves to find an audience; 10 or 15 years ago, it would entertain at multiplexes and likely do solid box office numbers. The whole Hollywood system needs cleaning."
Giving a 3/4 rating, Mick LaSalle of San Francisco Chronicle wrote, "Cleaner is a good-not-great thriller in the Die Hard mold that gets an extra lift from Campbell's skillful direction and from Ridley, who is slowly but surely showing herself to be a performer of wide range and appeal."