Review: ‘Clayface’ is good and very, very gross

Matt Hagen (Tom Rhys Harries) is an actor on top of the world, having made it from the rough parts of Gotham City to an Academy Award nomination. But one night out celebrating at the club leads him to make the mistake of sleeping with a mob boss’s girl (Joana Ribeiro) and waking up to a room full of goons and said mob boss ready to carve up Matt’s face. 

Abandoned by Hollywood and bled dry by surgeries and greedy lawyers, Matt returns to the mean streets of Gotham without much hope until stumbling across Dr. Caitlyn Corr (Naomi Acke, Sorry, Baby), an also down-on-her-luck scientist whose colleagues stole her ideas and are willing to cut corners to experiment with nanotechnology cells that could restore Matt’s face. This being a movie called Clayface, named after an iconic Batman villain who looks like a mountain of walking goo, we know any facial restoration will be short-lived. 

With James Gunn’s new DC movie universe starting to slowly roll out over the last couple of years, the idea, in theory, has been to be able to make space for connected storylines and standalones that allow creators to have more independent visions that don’t have to stick to the same type of visual and story aesthetic that Marvel movies have had difficulty continuing to stretch out. Clayface feels like the first big-screen test of this, promising audiences an actual comic book body-horror movie. 

And, by and large, it works by being very, very gross and gruesome, with scenes—one in particular in an airplane bathroom and a pair of scissors—that made me wince. Clayface’s R-rating is taken seriously here, with brief nudity and lots of horror effects while balancing the fun of Matt’s revenge with the tragedy that inevitably befalls him after he loses control over his mind and body, culminating in a heartbreaking ending scene. The mix of CGI and practical makeup effects is the real star, shifting between genuine horror and goofy mayhem as Matt takes on the mob goons who wronged him. 

The movie has a lot of logic you don’t want to think about, and Matt’s character psychology is pretty bare-bones, but Tom Rhys Harries carries it well, balancing movie-star charm with a wounded interior. Naomi Ackie is another highlight with what’s a pretty standard nerdy scientist who doesn’t understand social cues. She and Harries have strong chemistry together, and you really want these two crazy kids to make it, even though, again, you know where this movie is going. 

It was smart to have noted horror icon Mike Flanagan write the initial script and hiring a horror director; James Watkins (Eden Lake, See No Evil) and team are at their best when trying to fit David Cronenberg into the world of Batman. But beyond the horror elements and central pairing, the film lacks a strong point of view that would take Clayface from (admittedly) a fun time to a truly great genre fusion. 

Gotham City is the blandest it’s ever looked, settling for a vaguely dirty city when, fairly or not, it’s going to be compared to what we saw last in Matt Reeves’ The Batman. Likewise, the generic mob-boss antagonist who ruined Matt’s career (David Dencik) and his archetypal goons are so basic that you wish they would just die already whenever they’re on screen. Fortunately, they are pretty peripheral until the end of the film, but even then, is it so much to ask for a slightly interesting villain or a less stereotypical performance? Sorry to bring it back to The Batman, but John Turturro made a meal with table scraps. Clayface had a fraction of the budget this year’s Supergirl had, which could also explain why the seams show if you look closely. 

Overall, though, comic book and horror fans alike will have a blast watching Clayface, thanks to its comic-book thrills and spine-tingling body horror effects. This is a solid portrayal of a top Batman villain well known to people who grew up with Batman: The Animated Series, but who hasn’t shown up in any live-action movies so far. If it succeeds at the box office, it’ll also set the template for how the DC Universe can juggle both Superman and smaller, weirder stories like this.