It was only a matter of time until the superhero machine sunk its teeth into body horror. With Clayface, the DCU makes good on a long-awaited promise to the comic book set: a fully adult, viciously violent villain story. A decade ago, Clayface’s provocations — blood! gore! nudity! — would have been unconscionable within a major franchise. But the tides are shifting in the appetite of American audiences. Obsession and Backrooms ushered in a banner year for horror in an otherwise atrophied box office; the flash success of 2024’s The Substance proved the masses’ hunger for flesh. The unthinkable has become the inevitable, and Clayface has its boots on the blood-soaked ground.
A capeless origin story for a minor-league Batman villain, Clayface places Tom Rhys Harries as Matt Hagen, an up-and-coming actor from the slums of Gotham’s Lucas Heights. He’s doing his best to let go of a rough past, but things are moving in the right direction. “You hear that, mom?” he prays after celebrating a recent Oscar nom on the set of his current movie. That night, though, the celebration goes too far. Hagen cozies up to the wrong woman: Mia Torrez (Joana Ribeiro), the paramour of one Markos Szabo (David Dencik), one of Gotham’s most notorious mobsters. Szabo doesn’t take kindly to Hagen’s fling with his prize lady, and he and his goons decide to hit Hagen where it hurts: his face.
Hagen’s facial mutilation, like so many of Clayface’s theatrics, is brutal. Director James Watkins returns to and exceeds his taste for gore from Eden Lake; for at least the first third of Clayface, he also bends the knee to body horror’s longstanding love affair with practical effects. It’s genuinely shocking to see this sort of violence in a franchise film. Szabo’s knives carve Hagen’s face like a pumpkin, slitting cheeks, lips, eyelids, nostrils, all for the camera to drink in with vampiric curiosity. The attack leaves Hagen unrecognizable. Without his trademark mug, his acting career plummets as quickly as it picked up. Worse yet, Szabo has enough pull within Gotham’s legal system to clear his name and maintain his power. “We’re looking into it, but you know how this city is,” a dejected beat cop tells Hagen, his face still wrapped in bandages.
There’s one glimmer of hope: a buzzy doctor named Caitlyn Corr (Naomi Ackie) has been working on a nanotechnology from the fringes of Gotham’s scientific community, a miracle treatment that promises unprecedented, rapid healing. With nothing else to lose, Hagen seeks her out to serve as a human test subject. The experiment works, and Hagen gets his face back — but not without catastrophic side effects. Without warning (and often at the worst opportunity), Hagen’s face will melt into a cascade of putty-like flesh, a river of skin that can bend to choke the necks and fill the windpipes of everyone who’s done him wrong. Clayface is born.
Hagen’s descent into freakshow villainy allows Watkins an extended playground for the flesh fair that earns the first half of Clayface its good will. Much of the transformation is ghoulishly alluring — an eyelid operation on a turbulent airplane is particularly stomach-churning — but the further Hagen delves into monstrosity, the more Clayface relents to unsteady CGI that betrays the curiosity of its early designs. By the time Hagen’s full evil is unleashed, the shock and awe of his mutilations relent to a perfunctory quota fill. And it turns out that a goopy face isn’t the only collateral from Corr’s experiment: Hagen finds he’s also able to shapeshift into the exact likenesses of his friends and enemies; he changes personas in high-stress situations like a mood ring. It’s a device that employs a series of increasingly predictable bait-and-switches with the gusto of humorless Ethan Hunt gags.
Watkins sits at the helm of Clayface, but the headline behind-the-camera presence is Mike Flanagan. A horror-themed adaptation of Clayface had been a pet passion of Flanagan’s for years; after bandying about drafts for the better part of a half-decade, Flanagan’s project finally reached screens with substantial edits from Drive writer Hossein Amini. For better or for worse, there’s little trace of Flanagan’s trademark voice — pseudo-psych soliloquies and all — in the final product. In fact, it’s replaced with little voice at all. Clayface is doggedly determined to bend its auspicious start into the machinations of a standard-issue origin story. Plot points drift through like ticks on a punch-list: a sob story about Hagen’s childhood here, an inevitable flirtation between Hagen and Corr there. It’s especially insulting under the guise of a genre flick. That Clayface may have swerved from the movie-as-product model that’s fatigued superhero franchises for years was an interesting proposal, if not especially believable. Instead, we’re left with yet another character wrapped, shipped, and ready to appear in future installments.
Body horror, as Camp Miasma meticulously explored earlier this year, is more than flesh and fluids. The pillars of the genre are (intentionally or otherwise) prisms that refract the borders between entertainment and exploitation, eroticism and terror. Morality is both litmus and threshold, a malleable rubric to be prodded and provoked. Clayface — a clinically unsexy movie despite the nudity warning under its R rating — approaches its own sense of morality with the fluorescent duty of a Gantt chart, a calculated target of sliced skin, broken bones, and naked breasts to be hit before you can clock out and call it a day. Clayface makes good on its promise of gore, but for all that blood, there’s not much of a pulse to be found.
DIRECTOR: James Watkins; CAST: Tom Rhys Harries, Naomi Ackie, David Dencik, Eddie Marsan, Max Minghella; DISTRIBUTOR: Warner Bros.; IN THEATERS: October 23; RUNTIME: 1 hr. 48 min.
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