The day after I watched Clayface— the DC Universe entry that recounts the origin story of the long-standing Batman villain— I happened to attend an all-night horror movie marathon that kicked off with a 35 mm screening of David Cronenberg’s classic 1986 body horror movie The Fly. I don’t think I’d watched The Fly in its entirety since I was in college. Itself an adaptation of the 1958 monster movie of the same name, I was newly struck by how effectively it juggles so many different elements: it’s romantic and tragic, but also funny, but also gooey in its visuals that throw it back to its B movie origins, but also brimming with smart ideas about fusing to become the perfect couple or the perfect family begot by the lead character’s teleportation invention. I was also struck by how indebted Clayface is to the film both narratively and visually, a fact confirmed by a statement from the movie’s producer, Peter Safran. It’s perhaps unfair to compare the two, but while I did like Clayface quite a bit, the proximity of those watches clarified for me the aspects of it that don’t work so well.
Clayface is, first off, a departure from most Hollywood comic book movies, most notably in genre. It’s an R-rated horror movie, and the talent behind the camera reflects the project’s commitment to exploring the grotesqueness of lead Matt Hagen’s (Tom Rhys Harries) mutation, which occurs after the hot young actor’s handsome face is maimed by Markos Szabo (David Dencik), the powerful Gotham City mob boss who possesses the wealth and power to manipulate virtually anyone, and whose girlfriend Mia Torrez (Joana Ribeiro) Matt is bold enough to take home one night after she comes on to him in a club. His career shattered overnight, his team having abandoned him, and his loss of a civil case against Szabo preventing him from attaining justice through the accepted means and draining him of all his assets, Matt learns of an experimental treatment utilizing nanoid robotics that rapidly heals damaged tissue by Doctor Caitlyn Corr (Naomi Ackie). Caitlyn is reluctant to engage Matt as a test subject— the treatment simply isn’t ready for human trials on that scale— but her investors also pulled out of her project, leaving her with limited time and means to realize its effectiveness. At the encouragement of her police detective boyfriend John (Max Minghella), Caitlyn agrees to take on Matt as her patient, and the initial injection appears to restore his scarred features to their pre-injury appearance. But the effect doesn’t last, and Matt— in a fit of desperation— gives himself an overdose of the injection, fixing his face but also leading to more surprising side effects: like the ability to instantly heal from any injury, or to morph his features to adopt the appearance of anyone in his proximity.
Clayface is directed by James Watkins, whose previous feature directorial work is largely situated in the horror genre— from the 2012 gothic horror The Woman in Black to the 2024 American remake of the shocking Danish horror film Speak No Evil— and its screenplay was penned by Mike Flanagan and Hossein Amini from a story by Flanagan, who’s made a name for himself as showrunner of a number of acclaimed horror miniseries, from The Haunting of Hill House to a recently-released adaptation of Stephen King’s Carrie. Their resulting film may not be a precisely poetic rumination on the loss of humanity and the creation of monsters, but it is certainly a departure both for DC and for major Hollywood comic book movies in general. Rather than committing to gritty realism, Clayface revels in the artificiality of its special effects in a way that feels like a callback to Old Hollywood monster movies. The goopy-ness of Matt’s ever-morphing features— his face drooping to the point where it looks like his skin may fall straight off the bone at any time— is far more interesting than when he more capably harnesses his powers of transformation in the third act, even though that’s when narratively the film really hits its stride. The more desperate Matt becomes to save his face, the grislier the body horror aspect of the story becomes. The film effectively plays with the tension that his body could further twist into something horrible at any moment; one particular scene involving scissors and mid-flight turbulence had me cringing in my seat and shielding my eyes from the screen.
Late in the film, however— his mind overtaken by a toxic combination of revenge and romantic yearning— Matt tells Caitlyn that he doesn’t know who he is anymore. It’s a simple distillation of one of the film’s central themes: the loss of self that actors can experience when playing a role, the lines between what’s real and what’s performance becoming increasingly blurred. Clayface is further an effective commentary on the fleeting nature and cruelty of fame, where stars like Matt are packaged and sold as a product (products that have a shelf life, as we see when Matt is unceremoniously dropped by his agents and managers once his face is deformed) in a manner that dehumanizes them. But that statement can also be applied to the movie itself, which— like Matt— takes so many different shapes that it doesn’t seem to know if its trying to be a horror movie, or a revenge thriller, or if its protagonist is a tragic hero, or a ruthless villain. Clayface may be derivative of films like The Fly, but its unique in the field of comic book movies; still, despite all its shocking bursts of violence and lack of obvious ties to other DC products, the fact that it is still a major Hollywood studio movie that is intended to be a piece in a larger cinematic universe is something the film is constantly fighting against. The story rushes to get to Matt’s injury, and later, he makes the flip from innocent guy caught in terrible circumstances to someone who has no qualms killing for his own benefit with little preamble, as if the goal was less to tell a humanist-driven story, and more to make sure we got from Matt to Clayface— point A to point B— however possible.
The unfortunate side effect of this is a lack of consideration of just who Matt really is. We get virtually no time with him pre-injury, and therefore little sense of who he was as a person before the wrongs committed against him overtook his life. We know that he was a promising actor— there’s a scene where he receives an Academy Award nomination— and a heartthrob whose face tantalizing gazes out of magazine covers and attracts hordes of cheering female fans, but Harries’ performance— which at least capably handles Matt’s mopey-ness and tragic bent later in the film— doesn’t possess the charisma to reflect that. Perhaps the most intriguing thing the film pokes at in its early stages exist in the stories of bullying and assault that Matt’s old colleagues and acquaintances tell the court during his trial against Szabo. We know that Szabo rigged the jury and intimidated those close to Matt, but the idea that perhaps there’s some nugget of truth in those stories— that maybe Matt isn’t the nice guy he seems to be, that he was perhaps always heading in a direction toward villainy— is immensely interesting. But it’s difficult not to make another comparison to The Fly in this regard; Harries doesn’t possess an ounce of the intensity that Jeff Goldblum’s Seth Brundle does, and the character’s rage, possessiveness, obsessiveness, and loneliness don’t carry as much weight as a result. That’s not to say that there isn’t much merit in Clayface, even if it’s been done before, and better. I can only hope that we continue to see takes on classic comic book characters that swing away from the drabness of what’s become the status quo, whether they are wholly effective, or not.
Clayface is now playing in theaters. Runtime: 108 minutes. Rated R.
