Up to this point, the new DCU has a perfect record with me. I’ve liked or loved every film and every show it has released so far, so Clayface had a streak to protect before I even sat down. The noise around its release didn’t make things calmer, though. A critic watched it at a public screening and published his review ahead of the press embargo, and for a couple of days the online conversation was more about that controversy than the movie. Underneath all the drama, though, the early reception was positive, and I went in hoping to land with the happy, satisfied majority.
I knew very little about Clayface himself. He’s a Gotham villain, usually one of Batman’s enemies, occasionally an ally, and that was about it. So I wasn’t carrying any attachment to a specific version of the character. What I wanted was simple: a villain origin story with its own identity, and a first proper look at a live-action Gotham inside this universe. Only one of those two things showed up…
The Oscar nomination has barely sunk in when Matt Hagen (Tom Rhys Harries, The Gentlemen), a Gotham street kid turned Hollywood leading man, makes the worst decision of his life. A night out ends with him sleeping with the girlfriend of a local crime boss, and the retaliation leaves Matt’s face horribly disfigured. His career collapses almost overnight, and the people around him vanish just as fast. With nothing left, he tracks down Caitlyn Corr (Naomi Ackie, Blink Twice), a scientist whose experimental treatment has never been tried on a human being. It gives him his face back, and a lot more than that. Meanwhile, Caitlyn’s boyfriend, Gotham detective John Borrelli (Max Minghella, The Social Network), starts paying attention to what’s going on around her.
I didn’t need to know any comic book history going in, and neither will anyone else. Clayface is about as homework-free as a franchise flick gets these days. There’s no post-credits scene, no characters wandering in from previous films, and no need to remember anything from Superman, Supergirl, or even Creature Commandos, where Clayface already appeared. The movie takes place before all of that, and it plays like its own self-contained thing. It feels genuinely unique within the DCU, and I really liked that.
What gives the film its weight is how bluntly it ties Matt’s career to his face. The moment the face goes, so does everything else: the agent, the money, the people who were thrilled to stand next to him a week earlier. It’s not subtle, and it doesn’t try to be. It’s a pretty direct parallel to how Hollywood works in real life, where a career can hang on how someone looks far more than anyone in the business would admit. Some of its takes on loyalty land too, mostly in watching who disappears the second Matt stops being useful and who doesn’t.
There’s a darker idea underneath that. Matt is an actor, someone whose whole job is becoming other people, and the treatment makes that literal. His body can become anyone. The catch is that every borrowed face pulls him further from his own, and once revenge takes over, it gets harder to tell how much of Matt is still in there. The body horror is basically a map of that collapse, since the less he knows who he is, the less control he has over the clay.
Harries is the reason all of this works. The actor has the movie-star handsomeness the role needs, which matters more than it sounds, because Clayface has to convince you this face was worth an entire career. But what really sells Matt is the anguish, along with a thirst for revenge that keeps building. For most of the runtime, he keeps it quiet and contained. Then come the moments of wrath, and he becomes genuinely menacing. It’s a pretty damn great display.
I also appreciated that Clayface never tries to turn him into a hero. There’s no reluctant anti-hero arc, no sanding down of the edges so he’s easier to root for. Matt is wronged, absolutely, but the motivations that come to drive him are despicable, and the film is perfectly fine letting him be a “bad guy”. For a villain origin story, that’s the right call.
On the technical side, I have tons of praise. Director James Watkins (Speak No Evil) commits fully to the body horror, and the makeup and VFX deliver some truly scary imagery. The airplane bathroom sequence had me wanting to look away, partly because of how gnarly it looks, partly out of pure fear of what those scissors might do with every bump of turbulence. The practical effects and the remarkable prosthetic work deserve a lot of the credit. It isn’t 100% consistent, and a few shots look slightly off, but for the vast majority of the runtime, it’s very convincing. These departments clearly worked well together. It’s a grotesque movie in the best way possible.
Where it does feel cheap is the editing around those transformations. Whenever Clayface shifts from one person into another, the film simply cuts, as if a completely different person had been standing there all along, with no time given to the actual change. In action sequences, I understand the choice. It keeps the momentum and the kinetic energy going, and the disco set piece is the best example: a really entertaining stretch built on Clayface jumping between characters. The problem is that the same trick happens in the middle of dialogue scenes, too, where Clayface just switches choppily and instantly between people. I’m not sure if that was a budget decision or a stylistic one. Either way, it reads as a cheap shortcut.
My biggest criticism is the exact opposite of one of the things I praised most in The Batman, directed by Matt Reeves, who’s also a producer here. In Reeves’ film, Gotham felt like a character of its own, with a personality and an identity. In Clayface, it looks like any other city. Discos, dark alleys, and not much else. Nothing about it feels unique, and since this is the first time the DCU actually takes us to Gotham, that’s a bit of a shame.
The script, credited to Mike Flanagan (Doctor Sleep) and Hossein Amini (Drive), gets rather thin the moment it steps away from Matt’s main story. The supporting characters are underdeveloped across the board, Caitlyn included. Ackie is pretty good in the role, and her chemistry with Harries works, which does more for their scenes than the writing does. Minghella doesn’t have much to work with either. As for the people Clayface goes after, they’re just random mobsters, never really menacing and a bit cartoonish, which drains some tension from a revenge story that needs its targets to feel dangerous. I do want to shout out Joana Ribeiro as Mia Torrez, as Portuguese actresses continue to take over Hollywood. A pretty solid performance.
The second act falls into a loop, too. Matt goes back to Caitlyn’s lab to understand new data, tries something different, heads back out, something goes wrong, returns to Caitlyn, and the cycle starts again. The dialogue gets iffy quite a few times in that stretch, often repetitive or redundant. And the climax ends up underwhelming. The inevitable reveal of Clayface in his full monster form is pretty decent, but the rest of the finale doesn’t quite live up to it.
Final Thoughts on Clayface
Clayface is a grotesque, committed body horror villain origin story that’s refreshingly standalone, with no homework and no cinematic universe shenanigans. Tom Rhys Harries gives a pretty great lead performance, subtle for most of it and menacing when it counts, and Naomi Ackie is good alongside him. The practical effects and prosthetics are remarkable, the disco set piece is a blast, and the airplane bathroom scene had me looking away. I liked that it lets Matt be a villain and ties his career so bluntly to his face. Away from him, though, the writing gets thin. The supporting characters and the mobsters are weak, the second act runs in circles, the editing cuts corners on the transformations, the climax is underwhelming, and Gotham looks like any other city. Still, I quite liked it, and my DCU streak lives on.
Rating: B
Clayface released in theaters on October 23rd.
Learn more about the film, including how to watch it, at the official website for the title.
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