Clayface opens in North America on October 23 and internationally on October 21.
It takes the film a while to find its groove, but once it does, Clayface delivers just the sort of nasty but fun body horror I was hoping it would.
Director James Watkins has fashioned a gritty throwback to not only the hardboiled revenge thrillers and low-budget horror flicks of the ‘50s and ‘60s but also to the cult classics of the ‘80s and ‘90s that paid homage to them. (Shades of The Fly, Darkman, and Johnny Handsome can all be found in Clayface.)
Based on the DC Comics character and working from a screenplay by Mike Flanagan and Hossein Amini, Clayface follows rising young movie star Matt Hagen (Tom Rhys Harries), a Gotham City native whose sketchy, hardscrabble background calls to mind that of Mark Wahlberg. Now a successful film actor, everything is going Matt’s way — until he runs afoul of Gotham’s most vicious and powerful crime lord, Markos Szabo (David Dencik), whose goons carve up Matt’s pretty boy face as punishment.
Disfigured and distraught, Matt finds no recourse from either the law or from multiple surgeries until he seeks out assistance from Dr. Caitlyn Corr (Naomi Ackie). Caitlyn’s similarly down on her luck, with her cutting edge research having been recently ripped off by her former partners. When Matt comes to her volunteering to be a human test subject for her experimental, AI-infused nanobot regenerative tech, she reluctantly says yes. All seems to be going well at first, but this movie ain’t called Clayface because Matt’s new skincare regimen worked out great.
Harries has a young Malcolm McDowell quality to him, as in impish good looks that hint at an inner darkness. The actor never overplays his scenes despite there being plenty of opportunities for him to have gone big. As sympathetically played by Ackie, Caitlyn is more misguided than mad scientist despite being responsible for the physical monster Matt becomes. But while her nanobots have infiltrated and altered Matt, the film suggests they’ve merely unlocked and amplified a very bad side of him that was already there.
When Matt’s pursuit of his attackers and those who have betrayed him finally comes, it allows the film to finally embrace its inherent absurdity and capitalize on the nastiness it was keeping at bay while it was trying to make Matt sympathetic. Once Matt is no longer the victim and becomes the gooey Angel of Death we’ve been waiting for, the film gets a newfound jolt of energy and unleashes some of its most clever, thrilling and darkly funny sequences (following the earlier airplane bathroom scene seen in trailers and a creepy sleep study sequence).
Watkins has previously helmed genre films like The Woman in Black and Speak No Evil, in addition to the iconic “Shut Up and Dance” episode of Black Mirror. He and his creative team — including cinematographer Rob Hardy, production designer James Price, editor Jon Harris, Makeup Designer Nicole Stafford and Legacy Effects — make great use of Matt’s power to shapeshift, but also find the humor and tension in those situations, with Matt using his skills as an actor to literally inhabit a slew of different characters one after another.
As Matt’s condition worsens and his desire for revenge fully consumes him, he devolves morally and physically into something truly monstrous. Clayface’s comics and cartoon-accurate final form isn’t revealed until the film’s closing moments, but it effectively caps off Matt’s tragic downfall.
Although it carries the banner of James Gunn’s DC Studios, Clayface could just as easily have been set outside of the DCU. Aside from taking place in the DC Comics locations of Gotham City and Coast City, there’s nothing on display here that screams DC Comics. Still, Clayface proves that the DCU can offer more than just superhero fisticuffs and save-the-world plots. The question remains how large of an audience there will be for them.