Marcus Blake & Noah Santos

'The Cleaner' (2025) with Sophie Katsali

The traditional chauffeur of a story is conflict. Morals are pitted against one another, ideologies exchange blades, survival hangs in the balance. The shared values of a society govern how stories are told. Norms and prejudices shape the ideal of who is deemed good or bad. There are times when the antagonist’s whims—whether exposing corruption, challenging oppressive systems, or seeking vengeance–can appear more justified than the protagonist’s allegiance to the status quo.

Hear ‘em Out! is a discussion series exploring stories where the “villain is right.”

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After watching Cleaner (2025)—an aggressively average film where militant environmental organisers overthrow an energy company’s gala as a dishonourably discharged soldier-turned-window-cleaner fights to save the hostages after realising her older brother is among them—I reached out to Sophie Katsali of That Final Scene to chat about the film’s curious portrayal of villainous radical activists.

Spoilers for Cleaner (2025) ahead…

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Inigo
Cleaner structurally interested me in how it approached the common trope of what I like to call noble goal, crazy guy. The initial antagonist—the environmental activist Marcus Blake (played by Clive Owen)—is militant but somewhat agreeable. He leads a siege on a mega-corporation’s annual party with the intention of forcing confessions out of the shareholders for their environmental crimes and their covert killing of an activist. Blake is compelled to use force in the form of knock-out gas and intimidation but makes it clear he has no interest in killing anyone. Noah Santos (Taz Skylar) however, overruns the plan and quickly resorts to gratuitous murder. The corruption of Blake's noble goal is instantaneous because Santos’ violence is confronting and overt. Agnian’s corporate crimes are detached and ambient. The poisoned water produces faceless victims. The slain activist is revealed to us as a static image in a legal file. The corruption of Blake’s noble goal is beholden to the unwritten law that immediate violence is more transformative than the recollection of violence. That is why the Academy was quick to voice its disapproval when Will Smith slapped Chris Rock at the Oscars but were remarkably silent about Hamdan Ballal being kidnapped by Israeli militants to the point where they had to apologise. The film renders the crimes of Agnian as unobservable and therefore inconsequential. Santos’ observable violence ensures him the villain and cinematic logic dictates the villain deserves to die. The men who traffic unobservable violence might die but their death is a matter of shock value, tragedy and/or mobilisation for the plot. They deserve it—but it is in a far more nonchalant, atmospheric manner.

Sophie
You've nailed the core structure: the classic "noble goal, crazy guy" tango. Blake should be our way into questioning Agnian's eco-crimes. But his performative eco-gravitas gets immediately undermined. In fact, his siege exists in that cinematic twilight zone where villains make perfect sense until the script remembers they're not supposed to. Like Magneto's historical analysis (X-Men: First Class) before he's forced to become cartoonishly genocidal (X-Men: Apocalypse), or Sorry to Bother You's corporate villains whose business model is somehow less horrific than actual Amazon warehouses.

Your analysis of observable vs. unobservable violence opens up what I call "aesthetic conservatism"—how Cleaner's technical elements actively maintain status quo politics. Campbell's direction embodies this perfectly—his throwback approach to action traps Blake and Noah in lifeless fluorescent lighting that the film uses to drain the environmental manifesto of any vitality. Meanwhile, their acts of violence get the glossy action treatment with well-shot fight sequences. The aesthetic itself becomes the politics.

The script may present Blake as initially militant yet somewhat agreeable, but Campbell's visual framework absolutely fucks him over. The pristine compositions of corporate spaces versus the chaotic framing during the siege create a world where environmental crimes look like business as usual while resistance looks like madness. The seamless flow between Blake's legitimate critique and Noah's gratuitous murder blurs any moral distinction between them. It's cinematic guilt-by-association.

Campbell's crisp cutting functions as its own form of violence—slicing Blake's coherent eco-radicalism into disjointed fragments that read as derangement. The film's inconsistent pacing serves a political purpose—rushing through Blake's exposition like an auctioneer on speed while lingering pornographically on the human cost of his methods.

Perhaps the most honest film would show Agnian's executives continuing to poison communities while their PR team produces a movie about dangerous eco-terrorists threatening good American jobs. They'd call it Cleaner. And the Academy would eat that shit up.

Inigo
I’m considering how the film renders Santos in the lulls between what you named as the “pornographic lingerings” of his violent tenure. The police response team gathers intel to reveal Santos harbours “anti-humanist” leanings by showing an old video-recorded manifesto that he delivers from an unidentifiable interior, sitting in front of a brick-wall. The visual innuendo of terroristic threat is a perfect example of the “aesthetic conservatism” that you mentioned as the audience is coerced into an islamophobic association to justify disdain for him. His long hair is reminiscent of a young Barney Stinson, who was a naïve, hippy barista before the sitcom-trauma of losing his girlfriend to a finance bro transformed him to a suit-obsessed, raging misogynist in How I Met Your Mother. Santos peers down the barrel of the camera with a glassy-eyed stare declaring, “man is a blight upon the world. A cancer. A virus. And for a human virus requires a radical, invasive approach” and everything in that moment—his appearance, the cinematography of the clip, the language scripted for him—is a transparent attempt to ruin his credibility, yes. And, as you said, showcase his derangement, of course. But largely: present him as laughable. The lead officer cuts the manifesto with a dismissive “delightful!” that’s jam-packed with all the textbook British snark a three syllable word can muster. He, and therefore his position, is supposed to be a joke.

What I actually find funny about the scene is, if I were interpreting Santos’ manifesto through an afropessimist lens—he is perhaps the sanest person in the whole movie. His understanding of “humans” being a “virus” instantly made me consider how Frank Wilderson identifies the way whiteness rendered Black people “non-human” to reify itself.

If we read Santos’ usage of “human” as fundamentally demarcating Black people into “non-human” then his credibility-ruining rant reveals an ouroboros of white violence.

Santos’ manifesto is revelatory in that sense. An accurate diagnosis of the problem but a pathological investment in whiteness ruins his remedy. He says “man is a blight on the world” and a feminist lens would be concerned with how those blights are specific concentrations of patriarchal violence. He refers to the “human virus” to mean the collective population of people when it is specifically the industrialisation of Euro-colonial expansion that triggered our careen towards environmental collapse. The mega-corporations pumping harmful chemicals into the air, water and land exist today off the historically belittled and destroyed Black and indigenous ways of life. Every time we saw the inclusion of “Voodoo” in a film or TV show growing up, it was micro-conditioning to understand Black indigeneity as “savage” while conveniently deflecting away from how savagely the Euro-colonial capitalist expansion is burning through planet and people.

In that respect—you’re so right that this hypothetical film would clean up at the Oscars, not only because it would add to the aesthetic sanitisation of environmental destruction but it would also present said destruction as a philosophically inevitable tragedy that “we” collectively brought about together. Prejudicially divided in life, collectively responsible in doom.

Sophie
Inigo, your afropessimist reading of Santos' manifesto makes me want to run a thought experiment: Replace Santos with Elon Musk delivering the identical "humans are a virus" speech at a Tesla keynote. The same words would then be backed by soft amber lighting, steady tracking shots, and approving nods from executives—transforming a terrorist rant into a TED Talk on visionary futurism.

This isn't theoretical, of course. When Bezos tells us we should move our polluting industry into space, when Musk champions Mars colonisation because Earth is doomed, when Thiel is freezing his body after death ‘just in case’, when tech billionaires build luxury bunkers in New Zealand, they're expressing the same core misanthropy as Santos. Sam Altman secures billions for OpenAI while publishing essays about existential risk. Marc Andreessen parades his god-awful "Techno-Optimist Manifesto" advocating for technological solutions precisely because he believes current systems are unsustainable. The difference isn't content but presentation—who receives cinematic-like authority to express environmental despair.

Campbell's direction unconsciously enforces this double standard. Silicon Valley figureheads routinely describe humanity as an infection while stock prices explode; environmental activists say the same and become terrorists. This asymmetry extends beyond Cleaner into our actual media landscape: VICE documentaries use contemplative, respectful framing for billionaire preppers while employing frantic, destabilised shooting for non-wealthy ones expressing identical apocalyptic predictions.

This explains why environmental cinema fails so consistently—the medium has absorbed capitalism's core value judgments into its technical DNA. Even if Santos were able to pinpoint whiteness as the true virus destroying indigenous relationships with land more conspicuously, Campbell must render him visually illegitimate because the grammar of film itself has developed alongside colonial expansion. There's no established cinematic language to present Santos' perspective without immediate devaluation.

After watching Civil War, I realised this runs deeper than content alone. Films about environmental collapse can render apocalypse in exquisite detail but cannot visually legitimise activists who predict that collapse without marking them as extremists through technical devices. Your analysis exposes the most insidious aspect of Cleaner's failure: viewers walk away feeling they've rejected Santos based on rational assessment of his arguments, never recognising how the visual techniques predetermined their response. We believe we're exercising judgment when we're actually performing a reaction that was encoded for us through the camera.

Santos doesn't fail because his analysis is wrong—he fails because cinema's technical apparatus cannot visualise his position without marking it as aberrant.

Inigo
What you’ve said about films that “render apocalypse in exquisite detail” but “cannot visually legitimise activists who predict that collapse without marking them as extremists” makes me think of an essay that’s been gestating in my drafts about the western obsession with dystopian fiction. You’re right. There is an observable asymmetry when it comes to works about collapse—not only environmental but societal. The abundance of apocalyptic media has started to make me see it as hope-sterilising propaganda. The presentation of characters like Santos really helps grease the wheels. I’m going to be more aware of the “visual grammars” and “technical apparatuses” of cinema moving forward—paying attention to how they’re employed to warp or obscure the moral thrusts of the film.

Thank you so much for your all of thoughts, Sophie! I don’t know if we’ve convinced anyone to watch Cleaner but I reckon we might be the first people to discuss this film with such rigour and it’s been an absolute pleasure. To sign off, I wanted to ask you one final question: Is there any movie, TV show, novel or any story you can think of really, where you find yourself passionately agreeing with the villain?

Sophie
Really enjoyed this, thank you Inigo! I can’t help but catch myself nodding along to Killing Eve’s Villanelle's disgusted eye-roll at the beige mediocrity of existence. Her refusal to tolerate emotional fakery hits a nerve. I don’t condone the stabbing part (obviously!), but I'm drawn to how she spots someone equally trapped in Eve and says "I see you" in her own twisted way. We've all sat through dinner parties wondering if we're the only one noticing how everyone's pretending. Villanelle just turns that feeling into fashion-forward carnage while I bite my tongue. That core impulse to burn down the artificial and find something real? That part I passionately get. It's just that most of us settle for therapy instead of becoming international assassins.

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Sophie Katsali is the creator of That Final Scene, where she writes about how films and TV shows reflect the conversations we're having in culture today. With a background in running social media campaigns for major studios including Warner Bros, Universal Pictures and HBO, she brought her entertainment expertise first to Instagram and later expanded to Substack. Sophie now works in marketing for Canva.