‘Clayface’ Review: James Watkins’ DCU Monster Movie Is More Superhero Origin Story Than Horror Film

Despite being marketed as a horror movie, Clayface never strays too far from the superhero universe it inhabits. The third film in the new DCU — as the rebooted DC Comics universe has been called since James Gunn took control — James Watkins’ film, conceived and co-written by Mike Flanagan, takes a character originally known as a Batman villain and tells the brutal story of his origins. Because of the character’s particular nature, the film does contain several scenes that are considerably more uncomfortable and unpleasant to watch than those found in most superhero movies, but in terms of structure and form, it is not all that different from them.

In more ways than one, the film has things in common with The Fly, David Cronenberg’s film about the viscous, repulsive transformation of a person into a somewhat deformed creature. For much of the movie, Watkins lets loose with body horror sequences filled with uncomfortable moments involving brutal cuts and grotesque changes to the skin, but he never takes them into the more psychologically disturbing territory of the Canadian filmmaker, who surely would have had a field day with a story like this decades ago. Mostly because, beyond all the character’s gooey, ever-changing mutations, there isn’t all that much beneath the surface for the film to dig into.

When we first meet him, Matt Hagen (played by Welsh actor Tom Rhys Harries) is an actor who has just hit the big time after receiving an Academy Award nomination. He seems like a decent, sensitive guy on the path to success when he makes an unforgivable mistake. While out one night with his friend Corey (Joshua James), he makes the ill-advised decision to ask Theresa (Ruby Seer) to dance and then spend the night with her. Unfortunately, she happens to be the girlfriend of Markos Szabo (David Dencik), a feared Gotham mob boss. He catches them in flagrante delicto and proceeds to brutally slash Matt’s face, leaving him unrecognizable. The attack not only destroys the disfigured actor’s career but, through the mobster’s influence, also costs him the lawsuit he files. And all his money.

Matt is forced to return to the neighborhood where he grew up, The Narrows, in the more dangerous outskirts of Gotham. Desperate, he spots an advertisement for an experimental procedure that supposedly restores the original appearance of disfigured people. Despite the doubts of its creator, Dr. Caitlyn Corr (Naomi Ackie), who is still in the animal-testing stage of the procedure, he manages to convince her to try it on him. And so Matt enters a period of constant transformations, seemingly recovering at first, only for his face to become deformed again for one reason or another. And then again, and again, until he enters a more troubling phase that makes him consider getting revenge on those who initially hurt him.

Clayface is a bona fide origin story: nearly two-thirds of the movie are devoted to the treatment, the injections, the changing results they produce, and the ups and downs of the AI-powered nanocells (or something like that, don’t ask) scattered throughout his body. There is no magical transformation here. For one reason or another, and not always for reasons he can control, Matt’s face becomes disfigured and then returns to normal over and over again. Until, alongside his emotional collapse, his “clay face” begins to lead him into increasingly disturbing psychological changes. In the midst of all this, Matt falls in love with his doctor, but she, married to a police officer (Max Minghella), is unwilling to leave her husband for him.

The film works quite well during its protagonist’s constantly shifting metamorphosis. While there are plenty of twists in his physical “evolution,” and they can potentially become repetitive, Watkins manages to turn this series of mutations into something resembling a tragic romantic drama about a man obsessed with looking the way he used to and reclaiming his lost glory. Without the gothic ambition that a filmmaker like Guillermo del Toro might have brought to a character like this, Clayface nevertheless succeeds in connecting us with its protagonist’s anguished, physically painful quest.

The film begins to fall apart once Matt goes on the offensive. Not only does the plot become more predictable, but the movie itself starts abandoning its own logic and rules. I won’t reveal anything that might spoil the story, but at a certain point the things Matt can do with his face, his body and other parts of himself no longer fit the rules established up to that point, and the movie becomes something else entirely. From there on, it enters a territory where almost anything goes, largely abandoning the logic it had patiently established during its first half.

The actors presumably had a lot of fun taking part in the character’s transformations — at one point, he can take on the faces of people who affect him emotionally, for better or worse — since in many scenes Clayface is not played by the lead actor but by his co-stars. Watkins gets some clever mileage out of the potential confusion created by these mutations, but eventually the transformations lose all sense and, seemingly just to give the movie a few more action sequences, become arbitrary. And that’s when all the careful character-building gets buried beneath the weight of the visual tricks and special effects.