When You Clean a Stranger's Home (2020) User Reviews

Thought-provoking short film

[patiencealvarado · 10/10 · 13 June 2022]

I have to respond to the previous comment:

It's a six minute short film. The first person POV is not a voice everybody gets to hear every day, regardless of who wrote it. If the film was an hour and a half long (and nothing else was added), then I can see how it would lack "grit". I feel like the previous comment is irrelevant to the films message.

Additionally, the difference between working in a fast food restaurant or a place of business versus working in somebody's home is entirely different. It's an intimate and very personal setting that gives the homeowner home-court advantage. I get that using the word "dehumanize" instead of "servant" is preferred by the writer of the previous comment, but I don't know if the film's target audience would be able to truly empathize with the word "dehumanize". This assumes that every privileged person in America knows what that feels like. And I'm gonna go out on a limb here and say that they don't. I think that using straightforward language, like "servant" is far more reaching and impactful than decorating the film's vocabulary.

Unfulfilled potential

[rainybeet · 3/10 · 25 April 2022]

The dialogue feels as though it is written by a teenager that got "If You Give a Mouse a Cookie" stuck in her head. Written as though it is a first person account by a teenager, it is actually written by someone closer to the character of the mothers age, which could be why the script sounds so contrived, like a pseudo-poem written by a teenage girl for a high school creative writing class. This may have been the goal, but here success is not a good thing This short lacks grit, emotion, and a sense of reality that could create viewer empathy.

I would not mind seeing this remade as a documentary featuring actual Mexican American housekeepers. It is a story begging to be told, but unfortunately this film does not do that.

On a nitpicky final note. The narrator repeatedly says "When (such and such) happens it makes me feel like a servant." Everyone in the service industry IS a servant in one way or another. People in the public sector are called Public Servants. Servant is not negative or derogatory, but in this film it is repeatedly used as though it is. The use feels like the writer wanted to use the word "slave" but did not want to cross that line. I think that "dehumanized" could have worked.