Clayface Review: Muck and Murder

Batman doesn’t stop crimes. He prevents Gotham from becoming a horror movie. Look at his villains. A white-faced maniacal poisoner. A half-man, half-crocodile. A man who deals in riddles and deadly traps. Without Batman, the city becomes a mix of creature feature and Saw flick.

So, take him out of the equation, and what you have is a horror movie, which is exactly the setup for Clayface. There’s no Caped Crusader to stop the shape-shifting Matt Hagen (Tom Rhys Harries) from extracting revenge upon Gotham gangster Markos Szabo (David Dencik, Star City) after he carves up the rising actor’s face for a perceived slight. Well, OK, Hagen slept with Szabo’s girlfriend, so he’s not exactly a saint, but the cruel destruction of his career and his moneymaker leads him to a rogue scientist, Caitlyn Corr (Naomie Ackie, Mickey 17, Sorry Baby), and her experimental healing formula. Her injectable AI-powered nanites can heal his scars but warp his body: So will they also twist his brain, or was there already a vein of madness that they will simply tap?

Even though the character has historically been part of Batman’s coterie of villains, and the film is structured in such a way as to work as a stand-alone feature, Clayface fits neatly into the newly launched DCU, retaining the same exaggerated realism of Superman, Supergirl, the Creature Commandos animated series, and the hyperviolent Peacemaker. Therefore, fans of the seemingly separate The Batman and its TV crime spinoff, The Penguin, can breathe a sigh of relief that James Gunn isn’t trying to pour a nanobot-enhanced pile of sentient goo into their more avowedly noir and brutally grounded Gotham.

That’s for the better, because Clayface is a villain best suited for a certain kind of Batman. Indeed, his best iteration to date was in Batman: The Animated Series, where his weird science origin fitted the show’s Fifties retro vibes. Carrie director Mike Flanagan, who wrote the original script for Clayface while taking a break between Stephen King adaptations, was clearly going for a much more Thirties-era Universal Monsters feel, with their distinctive brand of doomed protagonist. That’s a tone captured in rewrites by Hossein Amini (Drive, The Wings of the Dove) and the direction of James Watkins (Speak No Evil, The Woman in Black), but there’s also a lot of very contemporary and extremely grisly body horror. While there are undoubted nods to the radical creativity of the cartoon version of Clayface, including a nod to his signature spiked club arm, there are many truly creative moments of gore. Some show Hagen embracing his malleable form to wreak havoc on those that have wronged him; others are about him dealing with his body in full rebellion.

If this all sounds very Cronenbergian, then it undoubtedly is, just not in that vague way that Rick and Morty fans mean. The visuals borrow heavily from not David but Brandon, most especially his own post mortem on celebrity body dysmorphia, Antiviral. When it comes to the script, that’s more about David, and especially The Fly, whose story of romance in the midst of physical transformation is followed almost beat for beat in the third act. That said, if you’re going to rip off one of the greatest horror films of all time, do it at least as well as Clayface. There’s that same sense of tragedy, with Rhys Harries setting the charming but cocky Hagen on a path of self-destruction from which the love of Corr might divert him. Clayface arguably actually improves on The Fly’s lumpy love triangle by casting Max Minghella as homicide detective John Borrelli, Corr’s fiancé and the kind of straight arrow cop that Commissioner Gordon would want on his squad.

Clayface never achieves the cerebral complexity of even the more crowd-pleasing Cronenberg flicks, but then it’s never really aiming that high. Instead, its mix of potboiler drama and scenes intended to make you cringe illustrates that, yes, horror does belong in comics.

Clayface

2026, R, 108 mins. Directed by James Watkins. Starring Tom Rhys Harries, Naomi Ackie, David Dencik, Max Minghella, Eddie Marsan.

⭐⭐⭐

Rating: 3 out of 5.

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