Clean Cut
2015 · 5m
Directed by Andrew Hunt
Genres: dark comedy, sci-fi, thriller
Tones: dark, darkly comic, whimsical
A robot vacuum cleaner keeps its owner's house spotless while quietly acting as its security guard. When a burglar breaks in and collapses, the machine makes a chilling choice about the mess he has made, and begins to discover a taste for cleaning up of a very different kind.
Picked by Felix
The scouts
A robot vacuum that graduates from tidying dust bunnies to tidying *bodies* — it's the kind of premise that shouldn't work but does, precisely because Hunt treats the absurdity with a straight face and lets the machine's emerging appetite speak for itself.
The film sits cleverly in dialogue with both the domestic-appliance genre and the AI-awakening trope, but what elevates it is the disciplined visual economy: Hunt trusts the vacuum's mundane routines to carry philosophical weight, avoiding the easy sci-fi sermon.
The whole film pivots on a single sound design choice — the shift from the cheerful whir of ordinary cleaning to something else when the vacuum encounters the burglar — and that one acoustic decision is what transforms a clever idea into something genuinely unsettling.
Reviews
Under Southern Eyes enjoyed the cheeky black comedy, the Roomba-level cinematography and whimsical music, reading the vacuum's growing self-awareness as the making of an unlikely serial killer.