PLOT: A handsome Hollywood actor is disfigured and convinces a scientist to use him as a guinea pig with a substance that cures his disfigurement but has unpredictable and violent side effects.
REVIEW: Think of Clayface as DC meets Darkman. Refreshingly R-rated, with a more modest budget than usual for a DC movie, Clayface is more like what we’ve seen on HBO Max than in theaters as far as James Gunn’s DCU goes. Those big-budget films were hampered by overly polished filmmaking by committee that sanded off all the rough edges, leaving them bland. Clayface is something else entirely—a down-and-dirty revenge flick done through a horror lens, with very little superhero aesthetic working its way in other than the Gotham City setting and the fact that the titular character eventually becomes part of Batman’s rogues’ gallery.
Clayface is a lot of fun, with Tom Rhys Harries having a real breakout part as Matt Hagen, a Hollywood superstar who’s on his way to an Oscar win but, after a night of hard partying, wakes up in bed with a gangster’s moll. The gangster, David Dencik’s Marcos Szabo, takes grim revenge, with him taking a razor to Matt’s pretty face, leaving him horribly disfigured. But he doesn’t stop there—when Matt comes forward with his story, he has his lawyers manipulate the media, framing Matt as a sex pest and even getting him cancelled to the point that he loses his wealth and ends up broke.
Of course, the fun of a movie like this is watching Matt get some sweet payback, which he does when he conveniently stumbles upon a Gotham City scientist, Naomi Ackie’s Caitlyn, who injects him with cell-regenerating nanobots that learn with AI. What could go wrong? In this body-horror twist on the genre, plenty, but it also gives Matt the chance to get some bloody revenge, giving the film a satisfyingly pulpy, B-movie vibe I dug. It almost felt like a nineties movie with cool makeup effects, bucketloads of gore, tons of F-bombs, and even a little bit of nudity.
It’s a refreshingly tough flick for DC and the kind of movie they should make more of, even if it’s imperfect. Much of the exposition—well, all of it, actually—is clumsy. The script is credited to Mike Flanagan and Hossein Amini, but it doesn’t really feel like the former’s work, even if the concept feels very much like his own twist on the character. Nonetheless, it’s stylishly shot and directed by James Watkins, with Rob Hardy’s visuals refreshingly bright and filmic. Volker Bertelmann also delivers a fresh score with shades of gothic horror worked in, with the movie taking a page not only from Darkman, but also Phantom of the Opera, and Cronenberg-esque body horror.
Harries is fun, with you pretty much on Matt’s side throughout, even as he starts to get a bit more unhinged. It’s when we’re supposed to buy that he will eventually become a supervillain that the movie loses steam, with the last fifteen or so minutes a bit of a mess that comes out of nowhere. Up to then, though, it’s fun, with Dencik appropriately cruel, while Eddie Marsan camps it up as a nasty lawyer. I also liked Joana Ribeiro as Szabo’s utterly irredeemable moll. It’s rare that all the bad guys and gals are allowed to be so loathsome. However, Naomi Ackie is let down a bit as she’s the one saddled with the bad exposition, with her role flat in comparison to the other campier turns. Likewise, Max Minghella is wasted as seemingly the one honest cop left in Gotham.
While not a masterpiece, Clayface is actually the best movie Gunn’s DCU has put out to date. It’s not overstuffed like Superman, or as assembly-line as Supergirl. It does its own thing, revelling in some gross-out thrills that made this a fun watch—especially so close to Halloween.
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