UAE audiences will get an early look at one of DC’s strangest bets yet. Clayface opens in cinemas across the country on Thursday, October 22, a day before its US release, and lands right on the run-up to Halloween.
That timing fits. If the trailer is any guide, it’s closer to a horror film that happens to be set in the DC Universe. It follows Matt Hagen (Tom Rhys Harries), a Hollywood actor on the rise whose career, and face, are wrecked by a scientific experiment gone badly wrong. The footage, scored with an eerie cover of The Flaming Lips’ Do You Realize??, stays on hospital beds, bandages and a body slowly losing its shape. It plays as tragedy rather than spectacle.
The team behind the transformation
Horror credentials run through the production. James Watkins, the director behind Speak No Evil, is at the helm. The screenplay is co-written by Mike Flanagan, whose The Haunting of Hill House reset expectations for what TV horror could do. Harries leads a cast that includes Naomi Ackie, who appears to play someone closely tied to Hagen’s transformation, alongside David Dencik and Eddie Marsan.
So, who is Clayface?
Clayface isn’t one man. He’s a mantle, passed across several characters over more than eight decades of Batman comics, and each of them came to it through ruin.
The first, Basil Karlo, debuted in 1940 and had no powers at all. He was a fading actor who couldn’t tell where his roles ended and he began. When a studio remade the horror film that had made him famous and left him out, he cracked. He took on the identity of the film’s killer and set out to murder the cast. He was a man so lost in performance that the villain became the only part left to him.
Matt Hagen, who arrived in 1961, is the version the new film adapts and the one most fans picture. A treasure hunter in the comics, he was exposed to a strange radioactive substance that turned his body into living, shapeable clay. He could become anyone or anything: a perfect impostor, a wall, a weapon. But the change didn’t last, and he had to keep returning to the source to hold onto it, a dependency that looked a lot like addiction. Batman: The Animated Series made that explicit in 1992 with “Feat of Clay”. In that episode, Hagen is a disfigured actor hooked on an experimental cream that restores his face, until an overdose turns him into a monster. That version cemented him as one of Batman’s most sympathetic foes, and the new film looks to be drawing on it.
Preston Payne took up the mantle in 1978. He was a scientist with a disfiguring condition who tried to cure himself with a serum derived from Hagen’s blood. Instead, it left him with a touch that melted living flesh, and he had to pass the affliction on to others just to survive. Cut off from human contact, he fell in love with a department-store mannequin, one of the most quietly devastating images in Batman lore. Sondra Fuller followed in 1987 as Lady Clay. She took on the shape-shifting form through technology rather than accident, later formed a relationship with Payne, and the two had a child.
The Joker chooses chaos. Penguin chooses power. Two-Face, scarred as he is, still has half a face to call his own. Clayface is different, because almost every version of him is made by desperation, vanity, illness or a scientist’s mistake. Very few were born to villainy.
Clayface's wound is about identity itself. He can wear any face in the world but loses his own. For a character built on actors, that’s a pointed kind of cruelty. These are people whose sense of self depended on being seen, recognised and admired, and they end up as a mass that can look like anyone and therefore like no one. His power and his trauma are the same thing, and every transformation reminds him of what he was and can’t get back.
That’s why the comics have never settled on what to do with him. In some stories he’s a monster Batman has to stop. In others, he’s a broken man looking for a way back, occasionally fighting alongside the Dark Knight when given the chance. Few villains carry that much pity alongside the menace.
If Watkins and Flanagan get it right, Clayface could be the DCU’s first true tragedy: a film about a man coming apart.