‘Clayface’: Gotham City’s Shape-Shifting Villain Gets a Campy Body Horror Origin Story

Alci Rengifo

The past decade or so has raised the bar so high on comic book movies that it’s rare to get one that just aims to be campy popcorn fun. Don’t walk into “Clayface” as a Batman purist. Or, at least, expecting something equal to Matt Reeves’ “The Batman,” which is the franchise initiator this movie is spinning out from. Like those issues that detour from the main character to focus on a random villain, “Clayface” operates like a self-contained tale. You can even put aside comic book lore and watch it as a late night body horror romp. Befitting a character with this kind of name, director James Watkins holds it together with some familiar tropes and enough logic to the plight of its gooey star.

The screenplay by renowned horror director Mike Flanagan and Hossein Amini does stick to Batman lore by introducing us to handsome actor Matt Hagen (Tom Rhys Harries), who is living the life of a movie star in Coast City (the DC equivalent of Los Angeles). His career is skyrocketing now that Matt has been nominated for an Academy Award. During a press tour, he makes a stop at his home city of Gotham to make a TV appearance. Afterwards, he does what most young movie stars do and hits a nightclub. On the dance floor he’s approached by a gorgeous woman he spends the night with. The next morning Matt wakes up to find the woman’s boyfriend, mob boss Markos Szabos (David Dencik), surrounding his bed with goons. Szabos proceeds to literally cut up Matt’s face in a rage. Left without his looks and thus a career, Matt suffers further when the Gotham courts prove so corrupt, Szabos goes free. The actor’s only hope seems to be Dr. Caitlyn Corr (Naomi Ackie), a scientist who has developed a nanotechnology capable of restoring wounded skin.

“Clayface” plays as if Blumhouse produced a DC movie, working in the tradition of campy thrillers like “Upgrade.” You could compare its main plot to “The Substance,” though as a character, Clayface started as a B-movie actor when introduced in DC Comics in the 1940s. The idea was made even more popular in “Batman: The Animated Series” in the ‘90s (this particular version reportedly inspired Flanagan). This kind of popcorn approach can sometimes get a point across better than more pretentious, “elevated horror” offerings. We can easily believe some hot young actor desperate for any procedure to fix a deformed visage. In its own way, “Clayface” has fun jabbing at Hollywood. Once Matt tries Caitlyn’s nanotech she warns him to give it a few days, instead, he instantly attends the red carpet of a play Matt was fired from. He shows off in front of his replacement and icy agent, before his face starts to suddenly melt. And no movie star in a thriller can trust their legal representative (Eddie Marsan), who is surely prone to rob them blind.

Watkins and his special effects team make sure not to overdo the CGI. Most of the body horror feels quite practical and squeamishly fun. Viewers allergic to gore can stay away as there are close-ups of surgeries, skin being grafted off limbs and body parts being torn off. Scenes play with the idea of having a physical crisis at the most inopportune moment, as when Matt realizes his eyes are beginning to fuse shut during a flight. When he locks himself in the bathroom to try and cut his lids open as turbulence hits, it works intensely well. As a character, Clayface’s main threat has always been the ability to shape shift, so the movie finds entertaining ways to have Matt take on the faces of the people he wants to get revenge from. There’s some impressive editing in a nightclub sequence where Szabos’ men don’t know what to do when Matt continuously changes identities around them. 

“Clayface” is part of the DC Studios lineup being overseen by James Gunn, though it doesn’t try too hard to connect itself to the wider “Batman” franchise. The caped crusader is never mentioned, or Wayne Enterprises. Cinematographer Rob Hardy is undoubtedly following the same textures of Greig Fraser’s work for “The Batman,” which is a win for this movie since Gotham again feels like a vast, gritty neon metropolis. However, like HBO’s “The Penguin,” you can fully enjoy this on its own terms. Matt becomes a campy, tragic anti-hero whose motivations are understandable, until his mutation begins to take on darker characteristics. A Frankenstein-like love angle is also thrown in involving Caitlyn, who genuinely feels for her patient to the detriment of fiancé John (Max Minghella), a Gotham cop trying to fight corruption. 

If you’re walking in hoping a movie titled “Clayface” delivers on its premise, then this might just deliver. And yes, for you Batman fans wondering, he will eventually look like that hulking mass of walking goop from the comics and animated series. It is how he gets there that works surprisingly well. In campy fashion, the filmmakers find engaging psychological angles to Matt with those age old questions of whether revenge is worth it, are looks everything, and if you could change faces, who would you become? “Clayface” might gross you out, but not by getting too shallow.

“Clayface” releases Oct. 23 in theaters nationwide.