Review: CLAYFACE

 by Rob DiCristino

His whole body is clay, actually. Claydude? Clayman? Let’s keep working on it!

Look, I’m not going to waste your time with an extended prologue detailing the origin and history of Clayface, the comic book villain known to audiences of all ages as a core member of Batman’s rogues’ gallery. It would be completely pointless for me to delve into the character’s myriad backstories — over a dozen people have used the moniker of “Clayface” since his first Detective Comics appearance in 1940 — or go beat by beat through his metahuman powers and abilities, which include temporary shapeshifting, mimicry, a generally amorphous physiology, and (if I’m reading Wikipedia correctly) the ability to dissolve his enemies simply by making eye contact with them. Again, that would be an egregious waste of column inches because, like The Dark Knight, The Man of Steel, and our Friendly Neighborhood Spider-Man, Clayface has been a firm fixture in our shared popular culture for generations. Frankly, you’d have to be living under a rock to not be primed for the third film in the revived DC Studios cinematic universe: Clayface.

I’m just fucking with you. Who the hell is Clayface? Apparently, he’s up-and-coming Hollywood heartthrob Matt Hagen (Tom Rhys Harries), who’s returned home to Gotham City to celebrate an Academy Award nomination for a smash performance. After a night out on the town with his best friend, Corey (Joshua James), Matt wakes up in bed with the beautiful Mia (Joana Ribeiro) who — in a stroke of the world’s worst luck — is actually the paramour of underworld heavyweight Markos Szabo (David Dencik). Szabo takes his revenge Mason Verger-style, slicing Matt’s famous face to shreds and dooming his career just as it was getting started. Bankrupted by several unsuccessful surgeries, Matt turns to Dr. Caitlyn Carr (Naomi Ackie), whose experimental AI-powered cellular regeneration techniques restore his hunkiness at a cost: His skin is now melty and pliable — clay-like, if you will — a complication that Matt will have to manage as he challenges Szabo, his mobbed-up lawyer (Eddie Marsan), and the corrupt justice system that supports them.

Helmed by journeyman James Watkins (2012’s The Woman in Black, 2024’s Speak No Evil) and co-written by Mike Flanagan and Hossein Amini, Clayface represents the first earnest attempt at a horror-leaning superhero blockbuster since the beginning of the MCU — which has infamously fumbled the bag on its own Blade reboot — and a clear sign that uber-producer James Gunn intends to take big swings with his revamped DC Universe. In its strongest moments, the film blends elements of David Cronenberg’s The Fly, Coralie Fargeat’s The Substance, and Sam Raimi’s Darkman with a general Phantom of the Opera vibe that will feel familiar to monster heads and four-quadrant general audiences alike. Punctuated by a handful of gunky, goopy body horror setpieces — including a meeting between bonded eyelid skin and a pair of scissors that will have you squirming in your theater seat — and a clever body-swapping sequence in the third act, Clayface has flashes of craft and style that pay heartfelt homage to a bygone golden era (era) of horror cinema.

Unfortunately, those moments of inspiration hang on a narrative skeleton that struggles to support their weight. Mixing the disastrous dialogue of Madame Web — in a tense moment, one character shouts, “Call one of your mob doctors!” — with the haphazard editing of Supergirl — including reams of awkward voice-over exposition clearly inserted to patch plot holes — Clayface bounces wildly between tones and themes that, pun absolutely intended, never congeal into anything solid. At times, the film wants to parallel Matt’s acting career with his identity-swapping powers (“Who is the real Matt Hagen?” asks a smirking late-night host). Other times, it wants to pit Matt against Detective John Borrelli (an ever-exasperated Max Minghella) in a battle for Caitlyn’s affections. More jumbled scenes deal with the nature of justice, the cut-throat world of celebrity, and the ethics of scientific experimentation. In short, what may have begun life as an affecting horror tragedy — written by Flanagan, I expect — is shredded worse than Hagen’s face.

To his credit, Tom Rhys Harries makes every effort to give his muscle-bound Elephant Man sufficient texture and charm that we’ll root for him even when — let me check my notes — he’s using his magnetic blood to rip his enemies’ skulls open from the inside. Harries may lack the star power to stand out among the Powells and Elordis, but his wide-set features have a manic quality that exaggerates the abuse they endure here, and they’ll contrast nicely with the chiseled David Corenswet in a showdown with Superman. Clayface deserves credit on that score, actually, as Watkins resists intrusive cameos and cheeky references to the universe his film is — at the pleasure of his new Skydance overlords, anyway — helping to build. Like most late-stage superhero cinema, though, Clayface is stuck in that impossible middle ground: Idiosyncratic above-the-line talent wants to make something offbeat and watchable, but the punishing machinery of IP filmmaking grinds that weirdness into an amorphous ball of bland, shapeless — yes, I’m going for it — clay.

Clayface hits U.S. theaters on Friday, October 23rd.