The film opens on a quiet domestic scene that cracks into violence. Eddie, a man entangled in an affair with Ana, confronts Ana's husband John Norcut after discovering that Ana is pregnant. Ana, who cannot bear to tell John--whose infertility and aversion to having children she knows well--has lied to Eddie about a miscarriage. Eddie arrives at John's house with the belief that John forced Ana to terminate the pregnancy; when John offers money in a failed attempt to placate him, Eddie erupts. In a sudden, brutal turn, Eddie kills John in John's own home, striking him down in a fit of rage after the attempted buy-off. Eddie then sets up the scene so that Tom Culter, a professional who removes evidence of violent deaths for hire, will be called in to clean the apartment.

Tom Culter receives the call and arrives at John Norcut's residence, where he finds the body and a ledger belonging to John that hints at police corruption. Tom examines the ledger and realizes it contains names and entries that could expose wrongdoing within the force. While Tom prepares to erase traces of the crime scene as his job requires, his investigation instincts prick at him. He pieces together indications that the death is not a simple domestic dispute. Tom begins to suspect that someone arranged for him to perform the cleanup--someone who intended to control what evidence survives.

Ana is riven by guilt and fear after John's death. She continues her affair with Eddie but struggles to live with the lie about the pregnancy. Eddie, having set events in motion, believes that John has destroyed the possibility of a life with Ana. The ledger John kept sits at the center of suspicion: it could reveal police corruption and powerful allies. Tom moves carefully, aware that the ledger could provoke dangerous people to violence to keep secrets buried.

Tom brings the ledger to Detective Vargas, a cop whose loyalty and pragmatism Tom gauges with unease. Tom and Vargas discuss whether the ledger should be turned over to internal affairs or destroyed to prevent a wider and deadlier unspooling. Tom decides that for the safety of those involved, burning the ledger is the responsible course, out of the belief that exposing certain names will bring more bloodshed than justice. Tom negotiates with Vargas, presenting the ledger and insisting that its destruction will protect innocent lives.

Eddie, who realizes that Tom has been involved in handling the Norcut cleanup, draws Tom into a larger trap. He coerces Tom into cleaning other scenes to make Tom complicit and to keep Tom occupied while Eddie continues covering his tracks. Tom senses the manipulation. He begins to set a counter-trap with Detective Vargas, hoping to catch Eddie in the act. He coordinates with Vargas so the police can move in when Eddie makes a mistake.

Eddie grows increasingly reckless. He follows leads to Tom's personal life and targets Tom's apartment. Inside Tom's home lives Tom's daughter Rose, a young woman who sees her father's moral compromises and harbors her own resolve. Eddie breaks into Tom's apartment while Tom is away and confronts Rose. Tom returns to find Eddie in his living room; the two men come to blows and exchange blunt, dangerous words. During the scuffle, the sounds alert the police who have taken positions outside, acting on Tom's trap with Vargas.

As the confrontation escalates, Eddie realizes that his safe window for escape is closing. He pulls a handgun and raises it toward Tom, prepared to fire in a final desperate moment. Rose, seeing Eddie lift the weapon and understanding the imminent threat to her father, draws a firearm she has concealed and fires a single shot. The bullet strikes Eddie in the chest. He collapses to the floor and dies in the apartment doorway, blood seeping across the carpet. The police storm the apartment and secure the scene.

After the shooting, Tom hands Detective Vargas the ledger he removed from John Norcut's house, insisting that burning it is in the best interest of everyone implicated. Vargas takes possession of the book under Tom's direction, and the two men agree that erasing its contents will prevent reprisals against people whose names appear. Tom then leaves the precinct and walks home to Rose, who is shaken but physically unharmed. He comforts her, holding her as she trembles from the shock of shooting the man who had threatened them. Tom tries to shield her from the consequences, telling her that she did what she had to do to protect them both.

Ana, meanwhile, lies in bed and weeps alone. She stays in the apartment she shared with John and remembers the possibility of the family that might have been--she thinks of the child she believed she had lost and of what she might have had with Eddie had she been honest. She contemplates the chain of choices that led to John's death and her continued affair with Eddie, realizing that the life she imagined is gone. She remains in the same house, crying quietly into the night.

In a quieter coda, Tom's employee Miguel, who cleans apartments and has helped Tom in his work, goes into Tom's vacant apartment to clean the blood Eddie left behind. Miguel scrubs at the carpet where the bullet splashed and uses chemicals and a brush to remove the stains. He works methodically, removing traces of the violent confrontation as if erasing the memory itself. Miguel lifts the rug, scrubs under it, and carries away the final stained cloths, leaving the room dim and empty.

The film then cuts to an entirely different opening in another city, where an entirely different life grows out of childhood escape. Joanna "Joey" Locke climbs the exterior walls of her London home to get away from an abusive father. As a child, she first learns to scale brick and glass to flee the household, mastering handholds and footholds as a means of survival. Twenty years later, Joey has translated that instinct for climbing into a job that requires both physical skill and a tolerance for heights: she works as a window cleaner on Canary Wharf, operating on One Canada Square, one of the tallest towers in the financial district.

Joey has an elder brother named Michael, who is autistic and channels his energies into an online crusade exposing abuses at care homes. Michael is passionate and relentless in his investigations into corruption and mistreatment, which has made him both determined and vulnerable. Joey cares for Michael; their sibling bond is practical and protective. Joey once served in the military but left after she beat a squad-mate who had behaved inappropriately toward a woman. She now spends weekdays suspended on ropes, cleaning glass for a living.

On the day the action in Canary Wharf erupts, Joey takes Michael to work with her because she has no alternative caretaker. Michael slips away from sight in the crowd during a shareholder gala being held by the Agnian Energy Company in the tower's grand ballroom. The gala is populated by Agnian's top brass--company owners Geoffrey and Gerald Milton among them--along with executives and wealthy guests celebrating Agnian's purported shift toward cleaner energy. Unbeknownst to most attendees, a radical environmental activist group that calls itself Earth Revolution has planned a takeover.

Noah, one of Joey's fellow window-cleaners and a member of Earth Revolution, is on the outside of the building when the group deploys sleeping gas canisters through ventilation shafts, rendering many of the attendees unconscious. The activist group's stated leader, Marcus Blake, intends to expose Agnian's hypocrisy: the company publicly claims to move to renewable energy while privately enabling environmental exploitation and even silencing dissent. Blake argues that Agnian has had activists arrested and then murdered to prevent testimony from reaching the public. As the group seizes control of the ballroom and takes Geoffrey, Gerald and others hostage, Blake tries to present his crusade as a moral stand.

As the takeover unfolds, Noah diverges from Blake's ideals. When Geoffrey Milton attempts to negotiate with the activists, Noah shoots him to death despite Blake's instruction to restrain. The sudden execution shocks the group and scatters the plan. Gerald Milton flees into the maze of offices and corridors to hide, pursued by terrorists. Then, when Marcus Blake attempts to shore up leadership and hold the group to its stated goals, Noah turns on Blake. Cornering Blake, Noah shoots and kills Blake along with Blake's loyalists, eliminating those who will not follow him. With Blake dead and his followers silenced, Noah seizes control of Earth Revolution.

Noah imposes a brutal logic: he straps explosives to the hostages and links those charges to a dead-man's switch synchronized with the rhythm of Noah's heartbeat. He fits explosive devices to each hostage and rigs them so that any incapacitation or death of Noah--or any deviation in his pulse--will trigger the charges. With the hostages turned into human bombs, Noah assumes a terrifying leverage over law enforcement and Agnian. He forces the captured executives and guests to record confessions on camera, admissions of corporate malfeasance or complicity, and uploads coercive statements that he intends to broadcast to the world.

Joey, still outside on the façade after cleaning windows with her colleague Noah earlier that day, spots the signs of the takeover as masked men move through the building. Michael tries to rejoin Joey from inside the gala but slips through security and gets caught up in the hostage situation. Sensing danger, Joey uses an SOS signal spelled in a fire escape code to call attention to her position on the tower's exterior. The attackers notice her but assume she is neutralized and leave her dangling on the building's face. The police quickly surround the tower, erecting a perimeter. Claire Hume, the commander leading the police task force, scrutinizes the available footage and doubts the apparent narratives. She allows Joey to make contact and listens while Joey explains what she has seen and the presence of Michael inside.

Hume hesitates to put civilians into a collapsed hostage situation, but when she cannot get a clear negotiation going with Noah, she gives Joey permission to re-enter the building and attempt to create an opening for SWAT. Following Hume's direction, Joey arranges for the specialized units to shoot several holes in the tower's thick, bulletproof glass so she can climb in. Noah anticipates a possible intrusion and seeks to eliminate Joey. He lowers a small explosive charge down to her position on the exterior in an attempt to detonate it and kill her outside the building. The charge detonates near her, blasting a portion of the façade inward and creating a gaping breach in the glass. Joey shields herself from the blast, sustaining scrapes and bruises, and uses the opening to enter the building.

Once inside, Joey and Michael engage directly with Noah's men. Noah dispatches teams to stop anyone who tries to free the hostages, but Michael and Joey pick off assailants in close combat and with firearms they seize. They kill several of Noah's men: in one corridor, Joey fires two shots that drop a gunman who aims a rifle at her; in a stairwell, Michael tackles another terrorist and disarms him, then fatally shoots him to stop the attacker from reaching the hostages. With those threats removed, Joey reaches the building's control room and hacks into its systems with Michael's help. There, they discover a propaganda clip on an old online account in which Noah had earlier posted an antivisit message detailing his intent to blow up the building and its occupants. Michael transfers the clip and the coerced confessions the terrorists recorded to a USB drive and uploads Noah's earlier video to the internet, exposing the leader's true motivations as self-serving and false.

After Michael moves the evidence to safety, Joey decides to lure Noah away from the hostages to neutralize the dead-man's trigger that he is using. She calls down to Hume and tells her to send in the commandos on her mark. Joey entices Noah into an isolated section of the damaged façade where the blast created a large hole. The two fight viciously near the jagged opening. Noah clutches the small electronic device strapped to his wrist that monitors his heartbeat and controls the hostages' explosives. During the brawl, Joey grabs the trigger device from Noah's arm and rips it free. She fastens it to her own wrist, taking on the risk of control over the detonators. Then, grasping Noah to prevent him from reaching the trigger, she shoves him toward the hole and forces him to topple out of the opening. Noah falls past the scaffold and glass, plunging several stories down alongside the tower; he dies on impact below, his body mangled by the fall.

With Noah dead, the chain that linked the hostages' explosives to his heartbeat breaks in the way Noah anticipated. Joey's having strapped the trigger to her own wrist buys time and control: rather than ending with an explosion, the system reacts to an altered input and the bombs can be dealt with by the bomb squad. As SWAT teams move in, Joey directs them to where the hostages are kept; the commandos physically secure each captive and carefully remove the explosive devices under the bomb squad's supervision. The hostages are freed without detonations. Law enforcement clears each room and escorts the shaken hostages out into the light where medics attend to them.

Following the clearance, Hume conducts a brief debrief with Joey and Michael. She thanks them for their bravery and acknowledges that without their intervention the casualties would have been far worse. Michael hands over the USB drive to the command, and Hume ensures it will be logged as evidence. Outside, journalists swarm the scene, but the content Michael uploaded has already begun to spread. The video of Noah's earlier declarations and the forced confessions are disseminated online, revealing that Noah's crusade was not the principled stand he claimed. More consequentially, the files on the drive detail Agnian's internal abuses, showing names, transactions and orders that implicate the company in environmental exploitation and the silencing of activists.

Public reaction is swift. The evidence Michael and Joey secure forces inquiries into Agnian Energy Company; regulators and the press begin examining the ledger of malpractices and the allegations of murdered activists. The disclosures stir outrage and investigations into the company's executives. Joey and Michael, exhausted and bloodied, leave the tower together. They walk away from the chaos with the knowledge that their actions have exposed corporate wrongdoing and prevented mass slaughter.

Back in the city, Tom comforts Rose in his living room, holding her as she trembles after killing Eddie to protect them. They sit together in silence for a long time until the adrenaline fades. Miguel, having finished scrubbing Eddie's blood from the carpet, packs up his cleaning supplies and closes the door behind him. Ana, alone in her bed, continues to cry for the child she thought she had and for the family that will never come to be. Authorities burn or otherwise remove the ledger entries Tom has handed over, at Tom's request, to protect those whose names would otherwise provoke violent reprisals.

Joey and Michael, after the legal and media dust begins to settle, use the information from the USB drive to continue exposing Agnian's corruption. The online files feed into wider investigations and help catalyze accountability for the company's executives. With their task complete, Joey and Michael leave London's brutal glare and go to the coast where they stay together for a period of quiet. They sit by the sea, wounded but alive, rebuilding a private peace after the violence inside the tower.

The final images of the film close on small, domestic gestures: Tom holding his daughter and trying to shield her from the consequences of the violent man she shot; Ana mourning in her bed; Miguel cleaning the last traces of blood from a carpet; and Joey and Michael, together on the shore, watching waves move in and out as they begin to live with what they have survived and what they have revealed. The stories of hidden crimes and desperate choices reach different resolves: criminals dead, secrets exposed, and survivors left to live with the aftermath.

The ending of Cleaner (2025) concludes with Joey successfully stopping Noah's deadly plan, saving the hostages, and exposing the corrupt energy company's crimes. Noah dies after falling from a high floor, and Joey escapes the building with her brother Michael. The incriminating files about the company's executives are leaked anonymously, revealing their corruption to the public.

Expanded narrative of the ending scene by scene:

As the hostage crisis escalates inside the towering One Canada Square building, Joey, the window cleaner with a military background, finds herself in a desperate situation. After the eco-terrorist group Earth Revolution, led by Marcus Blake and later usurped by Noah, takes the building's executives and guests hostage, tensions rise sharply. Noah, who has taken control, rigs the hostages with explosives linked to a dead man's switch synchronized to his heartbeat, threatening mass death if he is killed.

Joey initially struggles to get inside the building to intervene. She tries breaking a window but fails until her autistic brother Michael, who has been with her throughout the ordeal, uses his toy hammer to break the glass, allowing her entry. Together, they navigate through the building's hostile environment, fighting their way to the security room. There, Michael accesses files that document the executives' extensive corruption, including bribery, environmental exploitation, and even murder to silence whistleblowers.

Meanwhile, one of the hostages, Zee, realizes Noah's plan to kill everyone inside, including the activists themselves. She attempts to escape but is shot. Joey responds by shooting the assailant and securing the security room. Knowing that killing Noah would trigger the explosives, Joey instead steals Noah's watch, which controls the dead man's switch, to prevent the detonation.

The climax unfolds as Joey confronts Noah. In the ensuing struggle, Noah falls from a high floor to his death. With Noah gone and the threat neutralized, Joey rescues the hostages and exits the building safely with Michael. Outside, Officer Claire, who has been assisting Joey covertly, advises her to hide the incriminating files from the authorities, implying that the truth might be suppressed if officially revealed.

Despite this, the files eventually leak anonymously, exposing the energy company's executives and their crimes to the public. Joey and Michael survive the ordeal, having not only saved lives but also brought to light the corruption behind the corporate facade.

In summary, Joey's fate is survival and moral victory, Michael remains by her side, and Noah dies as a result of his own violent actions. The executives' fate is public disgrace through the leaked files, while the hostage crisis ends with the hostages saved. The film closes on a note of exposing truth and justice amid corporate and environmental corruption.

Yes, the 2025 movie Cleaner does have a post-credit scene. After the main climax where Joey prevents a deadly explosion and the corrupt executives are exposed, the final scene shows Joey and her brother Michael on a peaceful beach. They discuss the Marvel character Thanos, drawing a parallel between his villainy motivated by environmental concerns and the film's themes about extremism and good intentions gone wrong. This conversation underscores the movie's nuanced message about the dangers of ideological purity and extremism, even when rooted in valid causes like environmental activism.

The main protagonist is Joanna "Joey" Locke, an ex-soldier turned window cleaner in London. She has a military background and uses her climbing skills, developed from escaping an abusive household as a child, to work on high-rise buildings. She also cares for her autistic younger brother Michael.

Earth Revolution, an environmental activist group, takes 300 hostages at an energy company's gala to expose the corruption of Agnian Energy. They aim to reveal the company's hypocrisy in promoting environmental exploitation and pollution while publicly claiming to support renewable energy. The extremist leader Marcus Blake and later Noah escalate the violence to send a radical message.

Michael, Joey's autistic brother, is left waiting in the lobby of the Agnian Energy skyscraper while Joey works. During the hostage takeover, he slips away and attempts to join Joey outside on the building. He later helps Joey gain access to the building by smashing a window with a toy hammer, playing a crucial role in the rescue efforts.

Within Earth Revolution, Noah, a member who disagrees with leader Marcus Blake's idealism, kills Blake and his loyalists to usurp leadership. Noah then rigs the hostages with explosives connected to a dead man's switch synchronized to his heartbeat, escalating the threat and turning the group more violent and unstable.

Joey uses her military skills and window-cleaning expertise to attempt a rescue from outside the building, suspended 50 stories up. She faces physical danger, including failed window-breaking attempts and gunfire. She must navigate the threat of explosives linked to the hostages and confront Noah to prevent mass murder, all while protecting her brother and exposing the company's corruption.

The movie Cleaner (2025) is rated R for violence, language throughout, and brief drug use, indicating it is not family friendly for children or sensitive viewers.

Potentially objectionable or upsetting aspects include:

• Violence: The film involves a hostage situation with criminal activists, including threats of mass murder and intense action sequences.
• Language: Frequent strong language is present throughout the movie.
• Brief drug use: There is some depiction of drug use, though brief.
• Tense and distressing scenes: The hostage crisis and extremist threats create suspenseful and potentially disturbing moments.
• Emotional themes: The protagonist deals with family struggles, including caring for an autistic brother and confronting difficult personal and workplace conflicts.

Because of these elements, Cleaner is not suitable for children or viewers sensitive to violence, strong language, or intense thriller situations.