Hollywood is obsessed with turning comic book villains into blockbuster film headliners, for some reason. It’s been done a handful of times at Marvel, and DC found success a few years ago with Joker, before blowing it with a terrible sequel. Now, James Gunn and DC Studios are taking a crack at it with Clayface, a horror movie based on the Batman villain made popular in Batman: The Animated Series. In his move to live-action, the malleable baddie, ironically a disfigured Hollywood actor, delivers the best film of Gunn’s regime yet, a grotesque and thrilling body horror built by the best horror filmmaker in the business right now; Mike Flanagan.
Flanagan, best known for Doctor Sleep and the new Carrie series, co-writes Clayface alongside Hossein Amini. James Watkins, who scored a surprising hit in this genre years ago with The Woman in Black, is behind the camera for a film that has everything fans of body horror could want: disgusting prosthetics, copious amounts of spilled blood, tearing of the flesh, and a protagonist whose grip on reality is fading as fast as his celebrity career. It’s a Cronenberg-esque freak show the likes of which we haven’t seen in superhero movies before.
Welsh actor Tom Rhys Harries plays Matt Hagen, who has pulled himself up from the streets of Gotham City to become a big shot Hollywood actor, earning his first Oscar nomination. Matt has it all; money, fame, appearances on a Tonight Show-esque talk show hosted by Rob Brydon. He also has a bit of a chip on his shoulder, as most people who come up from nothing to. When he’s warned away from Mia (Joana Ribeiro), the stunning and unfaithful girlfriend of violent mob boss Markos Szabo (David Dencik), Matt sleeps with her anyway, feeling untouchable.
Boy, does he get touched, and not in a good way. Matt wakes up the next day surrounded by Markos and his goons, who proceed to slice and dice his face into ribbons. It’s just one of many sequences that will make your stomach turn, as the blade is used to chop up his nose and mouth from the inside out. His life and career ruined, Matt finds that everyone who had been with him when he was famous has turned on him. He loses his agents, the women, and even his best friend, Corey (Joshua James), is keeping his distance. Even worse, Matt’s attempt at a civil lawsuit goes nowhere and bleeds him dry financially. That sweet apartment? Poof! It’s gone, too.
Naomi Ackie plays Caitlyn Corr, the radical doctor whose experimental nanotechnology gives Matt a semblance of hope. Her treatment has been shown to repair organ and skin damage in animals, but never before on humans. It takes some convincing, but Matt finally wears her down. He doesn’t care what happens to him; he’s already at rock bottom.
In true body horror fashion, the treatment works…but at a price. Over the course of weeks, Matt gets his face back and, for a time, his life, too. However, it’s while showing off at a movie premiere that his face begins to droop, right in front of his former agent. Distraught, Matt irrationally injects his body with all of Caitlyn’s formula and Voila!, you’ve got yourself a Clayface who can shapeshift seemingly at will and instantly recover from injuries.
The Clayface character is a tragic figure, one who had everything and went nuts when it was all taken away from him. You spend much of the film sympathizing with Matt, who has been betrayed by the people closest to him and mutilated by a thug who parades around on TV. There’s no help coming for Matt from the law, either, as the only honest cop in the eternally corrupt GCPD is Caitlyn’s fiancé, John, played by Max Minghella. Matt goes on a revenge tour, seeking out those who wronged him and using his powers to destroy them and get away without being identified.
If there’s a problem with Clayface, it’s that Matt isn’t on a true villain’s journey for most of it. In a lot of ways, he’s like Tom Hardy’s Venom, or Hannibal Lecter in the sequel to The Silence of the Lambs. His brutality is reserved for the worst of the worst, so we aren’t horrified at the terrible things he does to them. Instead, we kinda champion what he’s doing, and that’s not the reaction the film is going for. The film is technically a prequel, as the Matt Hagen/Clayface character appears in Gunn’s animated Creature Commandos series, and he’s quite different from how he is for most of the movie.
That said, Clayface hones in on factors beyond simple revenge to flesh out his evolution into full-fledged villainy. There’s the potential romance with Caitlyn, as sparks between the two are immediate. This creates an obvious conflict as she grapples with her engagement to John, her feelings for Matt, and what she knows about Matt’s murderous actions. There’s also the untold psychological damage that comes from Matt’s traumatic experiences and sudden “gift” of superpowers. Nobody can have this much happen to them and not be changed in the worst possible way.
Clayface works best the more it leans into the horror aspects. The visual effects and make-up work are great, especially when Matt is still figuring out what his body can and can’t do. It’s a film that is unabashedly disgusting and weird, and superhero movies could use a lot more of both. You don’t have to be a fan of Batman’s Rogues Gallery to enjoy Clayface, just being a fan of good horror flicks is more than enough.
