Clayface is a much-needed facelift for the fledging DC Universe in the form of a lean, mean body horror thrill ride.
We don’t need to know as much as we do about each other, let alone the actors who are on our cinema screens. That blurring of reality and fiction can wreak havoc on our suspension of disbelief (see Tom Cruise in Digger). That’s why, despite being the titular character in Clayface, we’re kept at arm’s length from rising Hollywood actor Matt Hagen (Tom Rhys Harries) and witness only what happens to him in the here and now.
So, what do we know about pretty boy Matt Hagen? Well, he’s friendly with all his movie crew members, and he believes in taking the tragedy of one’s life to create something beautiful. That’s it, really. While Harries is easily believable as a properly nice bloke, we don’t even know if Hagen’s actually a good actor other than everyone telling us how great he is. The one brief moment of tearful joy when he learns about his Academy Award nomination is about as much as we get.
Director James Watkins makes the bold choice to make Hagen less of a character and more of a subject, one that’s ultimately malleable to the whims of a seemingly tragic story. Watkins cuts down his handsome tall poppy at a relentless pace, culminating in a local Gotham mob boss (David Dencik) maiming his face in a truly horrific sequence that dares you to keep watching. I lost count of how many times I winced at the violence, yet the intrigue kept building. You don’t really care what will happen to Hagen – a lot of what happens to him is self-inflicted – but you are invested in how this volatile test subject will react to adversity.
As melodramatic as Hagen’s downfall is, our lack of connection to him allows Clayface to have some unexpected fun in his despair. The repeated agonising over his face lampoons actors for being vapid and fixated on the wrong things. Our protagonist may be our main character, but the movie makes it doubly clear that his genuine nice-guy traits don’t make him a hero. Hagen’s mask of choice to hide his disfigured face is also an obvious but fun little reference to the Phantom in The Phantom of the Opera. And who is his Christine? Enter disgraced scientist Dr Caitlyn Corr (Naomi Ackie) and her experimental AI/nanotech.
Obsessing over one’s looks is pretty stupid, but when a person sinks lower than rock bottom (in their mind), they will become desperate enough to do anything to escape their hell. For Hagen, it means signing up for Corr’s experimental trial. For Corr, it means crossing her ethical boundary as a doctor in the pursuit of her work. Their doctor/patient dynamic initially works, and so do her nanobots. But like the Phantom and Christine, it’s never going to end well, and that’s when Clayface hits its grossest and most engrossing stride.
The movie doesn’t waste time with ‘woe is me’ monologues, opting to show Hagen’s turmoil through ego-driven action and reaction. When his face starts melting, he goes against Corr’s advice and injects more nanobots into his eyes, with the camera never pulling away from the needle going right into his face. When his eyes start sealing shut, like a virus-infected version of Neo’s mouth from The Matrix, he cuts them open using scissors in an unbearably uncomfortable close-up body horror sequence. And when he confronts his attackers again, he inadvertently breaks bad when he learns what his new clay-like nanobots can do.
Corr and Hagen’s dynamic quickly mutates into a modern-day Frankenstein tale. Mike Flanagan and Hossein Amini’s script tries to push the Hagen/Corr dynamic down the overused romantic route, but Ackie and Harries’s performances rescue what is easily Clayface’s weakest aspect. When Corr is monitoring Hagen’s vitals while he sleeps, her confused reaction to his subconscious is ambiguous yet tinged with something else. Is it pride? Affection? Hubris? He is proof that her work can be effective after all. On the flip side, Hagen claims he’s in love with Corr, but Harries plays it as someone desperately clinging to her like a morality chain.
As the nanobot-enhanced Hagen embraces his worst impulses, his transformation from subject to anti-hero is thrilling. The character turn was always lurking in the background, kept in the back of our minds by Volker Bertelmann’s haunting operatic score. The bellowing horns and sinister strings linger softly at the beginning before pushing to the forefront as Clayface reassembles Hagen into a terrifying horror villain for the third act.
When we reach the movie’s climactic action showpiece, it brings Hagen’s earlier musings about acting being a gateway to the soul full circle in the most imaginative and disgusting way possible. By this point, any inkling of a last-minute twist or rug pull has disappeared. Clayface never pretended to be a superhero movie that’s cut from a similar cloth as previous DC entries did, and credit to the filmmakers for committing to the story right until the end. What initially appeared to be a downfall story is recontextualised by the climax, revealing that something else entirely was unfolding before our very eyes the whole time.
What’s most surprising is that Clayface clocks in at a brisk 108 minutes. Not a single moment is wasted, and the pace of Hagen’s rise, fall, and reassembly is so relentlessly entertaining that you don’t realise the flaws or logical problems until you’re walking out of the cinema and gushing over how exhilarating the whole thing was. I could be hung up on Hagen making stupid choices or somehow not being smart enough to put the many obvious clues together, but it’s easy to wave those nitpicks away when a movie is as hellbent on keeping you entertained as Clayface is.
This was DC at its most confident and another sign that IP filmmaking can still be creatively satisfying for everyone. Turns out we truly didn’t need to know who Clayface was or is at all because when you have a story that only asks us to commit as hard as it does, you’ll have a great time without any lingering DC-shaped baggage hanging over it.
