Clayface Struggles To Take Shape
The scariest thing about this Batman rogue’s origin story is how half-baked it is.
Clayface had all the pieces in place to be good. It centers on a tragic Batman villain who’s never really been done justice on the big screen before. It’s got the potential to deliver body-horror thrills unseen in a major comic book tentpole — and with its R-rating, to really deliver on them. And most importantly, it could be more than just a superhero movie; the story of an acclaimed actor who transforms into a shapeshifting clay monster was the perfect set-up for a good, provocative horror movie in the vein of The Invisible Man. The only thing is that Clayface makes half-baked gestures at all of these things, only to never really execute on any of them.
The issue may trace back to the original vision for Clayface, from Haunting of Hill House and Carrie maestro Mike Flanagan. Or, more specifically, that we never actually got this vision. Flanagan pitched his Clayface back in 2023, but scheduling issues ultimately prevented him from directing it. Instead, The Woman in Black director James Watkins stepped in to helm the DCU movie, with Flanagan co-writing the screenplay with Hossein Amini. The result is a movie that feels like it was Frankensteined together from better ideas, only to be flattened into a pale imitation of better horror movies before it.
Matt Hagen gets carved up.
None of the fault, however, lies with lead Tom Rhys Harries, who imbues rising movie star Matt Hagen with a genuine sincerity and sweetness before it all comes crashing down. When we begin the film, Matt is on top of the world: he’s just been nominated for an Oscar, he’s about to make his flashy stage debut, and he’s a testament to his hometown of Gotham, where he grew up in the impoverished Narrows. But his homecoming immediately turns to disaster when a night out clubbing ends in him meeting, and falling into bed, with Mia Torrez (Joana Ribeiro), despite a warning from his best friend (Joshua James) that she’s the girlfriend of notorious Gotham gangster Markos Zsabo (David Dencik). When he wakes, he’s surrounded by Zsabo and his henchmen, who immediately get to work carving up his face with switchblades.
From there, it only goes from bad to worse: Matt goes to court against Zsabo, who uses the corrupt institutions of Gotham to leave his reputation and career ruined; and several botched plastic surgery operations finish the job. At rock bottom and living back in the slums he sought to escape, Matt turns to an experimental “nanocells” procedure headed by Dr. Caitlyn Corr (Naomi Ackie). Though Corr warns him about the potential dangers of the experiment, Matt sneaks in a dangerously high injection, leading him to gain regenerative, shape-shifting abilities — and also a thirst for revenge.
Dr. Caitlyn Corr begins her experiments.
There’s a campy Universal Monsters riff hidden somewhere in this movie; it’s built into the premise of a man driven mad by a scientific experiment that leaves him a monster. And that’s where previous screen adaptations of Clayface’s story were most successful. Both Batman: The Animated Series and the more recent Caped Crusader leaned into the B-movie period settings that inspired Clayface’s comic book origins. And glimmers of those origins remain in the movie’s grimy, neon-lit vision of Gotham City and funky needle drops. Perhaps if Clayface had been the ‘70s period piece it was clearly itching to be, it may have elevated it from the forgettable, generic horror movie that it turns into.
And there’s the whisper of what Flanagan’s film almost was, with the film’s pondering of identity, selfhood, and “who the real Matt Hagen is.” That version of Clayface is buried a few layers deeper, but is actively fighting against all the other elements too, which feel shoddily put together: a generic villain that feels straight out of the Arrowverse; dialogue that wouldn’t pass muster on TV; random basketball and dance scenes that feel oddly reminiscent of early aughts superhero movies; and most disappointingly, bad CGI.
The last one is the biggest kneecap for Clayface, which goes hard on the body horror early on, with gooey prosthetics and gnarly face-cutting scenes that make the most of its R-rating. But when it comes to the actual Clayface transformations, the movie is oddly timid — preferring to employ quick cuts to Matt suddenly appearing as someone else, or showing silhouettes of Clayface’s iconic club arm. Like many of the most boring Sony Spider-Man spinoffs, Clayface seems at times embarrassed to be a comic book movie, which wouldn’t be an issue if it didn’t undercut its own attempts at body horror. Only a handful of scenes show Clayface going whole-hog on Matt’s transformations, in all their gross, gory glory, and those were naturally the ones shown in the trailers.
Clayface desperately needed more clay action.
Despite Harries’ sympathetic performance — you genuinely buy how a good guy can turn into a vengeful monster — and his simmering chemistry with Ackie, who equally gives more depth to her character than the script offers, Clayface is less than the sum of its parts. Its glimmers of potential only give us peeks at the better movies it could’ve been, while an underbaked script and laughably clunky dialogue only seal the deal: this was a failed experiment that should’ve never left the lab.
