93 min | R | January 28, 2022 | IFC Films
Adrien Brody plays a garbage man hauling around a violent past he cannot bury. A teenage girl next door pulls him back into the world he tried to leave behind. The atmosphere does all the work the script forgets to do.
Clean drives a garbage truck through a decaying upstate town. He collects junk and rebuilds it in a workshop cluttered with salvaged parts. He keeps to himself and counts the days he stays sober and quiet. The film is the familiar story of a man with a buried past who gets pulled back into violence when the world refuses to leave him alone. Paul Solet wants this to be a meditation on guilt and atonement. It plays as a revenge thriller wearing the costume of a character study.
Adrien Brody plays Clean as a coiled man who speaks in a low murmur and moves like he is afraid of his own hands. Brody co-wrote the part for himself and pours everything into the silences. He gives the film a center of gravity it does not earn anywhere else. Glenn Fleshler plays Michael, a local crime boss who fences stolen jewelry and treats menace as a line item. Richie Merritt plays his son Mikey as a weak kid desperate to prove he is dangerous. Chandler DuPont plays Dianda, the neighbor girl Clean tries to protect, and she holds her scenes against Brody’s heavier presence.
Paul Solet directs the film he co-wrote with Brody in washed-out grays and perpetual overcast. The cinematography drains color from every frame until the town looks like wet concrete. Brody also composes the score, and it leans on low drones that signal dread before anything happens. The editing lingers on hands at work, sorting scrap and fixing engines, building a rhythm of labor as penance. The technique is committed and consistent across every scene. It is also lifted wholesale from a decade of better grim-loner thrillers.
Clean knows exactly what it wants to be and never reaches past it. The third act collapses into the bloodshed the whole film has been promising, and the violence answers questions the script never bothered to ask. Brody carries the weight of a man who cannot outrun himself, and the film keeps handing him a genre that wants only the body count. The result is a mood piece bolted to a thriller plot with neither half fully served. It is watchable and forgettable in the same breath.