Sunshine Cleaning

Try if you can to avoid the inevitable salvo of assurances that ‘Sunshine Cleaning’ is this year’s ‘Little Miss Sunshine’, or this year’s ‘Juno’. Sure, it has the usual Sundance/US indie baggage – sibling rivalry, unfeasibly precocious/adorable child actor, Alan Arkin essaying the loveably eccentric side to senility… again – but this is actually superior to both those films.

Amy Adams and Emily Blunt make for a convincing pairing as Rose and Norah Lorkowski, blue-collar siblings who hatch a scheme to make big money clearing up the blood and guts at crime scenes. There are plenty of ‘ewww!’ gags in the early stages, but things start to refocus when the messiness of their grimy new profession rolls over into a storyline full of decoys, loose ends and characters who, rather poignantly, just drift away. Jeffs makes a good fist of the direction and Blunt proves that she can do comedy, but it’s Adams’s comforting, charismatic central turn which really gives the film its lift.