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Various characters have carried the mantle of villain Clayface in DC Comics over eight decades – but the two most prominent must surely be Basil Karlo and Matt Hagen.
Karlo, the first Clayface who debuted in June 1940, was a B-movie actor who had no superpowers but a thirst for blood and a penchant for crime. In the 1950s Batman adventures, Clayface reappeared in the form of Matt Hagen, a treasure hunter whose accidental encounter with radioactive material gave him the power to transform into a lumbering mass of mud with superhuman strength and the ability to transform into any likeness.
Other comic book versions of Clayface have come and gone over the decades, but for his big screen debut DC decided to bring back Matt Hagen once again. This time, Clayface takes center stage in a supervillain origin story, with a generous helping of body horror – a subgenre that has enjoyed renewed popularity in recent years.
In the contemporary reimagining of the film, Hagen is a Hollywood actor whose career high ends when his face is brutally mutilated by mobsters in revenge for sleeping with the girlfriend of their gang boss. A desperate Hagen decides to pose as a human guinea pig for the test of an experimental formula containing microscopic AI.
This treatment promises to regenerate damaged cells and repair the body to its original form. At first the results are promising, but then, in response to emotional excitement – especially anger – his flesh begins to cry and take on an unpredictable life of its own.
According to the comics, Hagen learns to shift his malleable face to mimic others. He uses these new skills in a vicious revenge rampage on the gangsters who attacked him and destroyed his career.
While Clayface doesn’t live up to its genre-bending promise of a comic book body horror, it’s not an unmitigated disaster. The film is entertaining and features enough imaginative sequences to forgive some of its more prosaic and one-dimensional aspects.
I was excited at the prospect of a supervillain story from writer and director Mike Flanagan. The horror impresario is responsible for some brilliant recent adaptations, including the peerless Haunting of Hill House for Netflix. I was also greatly impressed by his risky, imaginative update of Stephen King’s debut novel Carrie. However, Flanagan backed out of the lead role – possibly due to scheduling conflicts with Carrie.
He retains a co-writing credit. But there is little in this film that recalls Flanagan’s sensitivity to character and the nuanced dialogue of his best work. A complete rewrite by British-Iranian screenwriter Hossein Amini (the excellent Drive, the not-so-excellent The Snowman) may be partly responsible for the film’s tonal uncertainty and a strangely non-committal feel to much of the action.
The finished product seems to struggle with the sheer originality of its premise and the need for mainstream appeal.
A strong lead for thin material
That said, Clayface’s lead, Welsh actor Tom Rhys Harries, carries the weaker aspects of the script extremely well with an admirable commitment to his character’s terrifying transformations. The best scenes of the film show Hagen facing what can either be seen as an exciting new body with superhuman abilities or a terrifying total degeneration.
Harries’ energetic performance produces some memorable sequences where Hagen struggles with his restless body, the best of which involves a battle to keep his dysfunctional, goopy eyelids from sealing shut. Prosthetic effects are effectively mixed with CGI – and horror fans should enjoy the effort and dedication of the actors and the effects crew.
There are different shades of Coralie Fargeat’s terrifying and brilliant mainstream body horror breakthrough The Substance (2024). Clayface shares the relentlessly gory film’s interest in the shallow vanity of celebrity and the lengths the protagonist goes to preserve youth and beauty in a skin-deep world.
Also, the connection between Hagen’s emotional state and his progressively decaying flesh results in an interesting exploration of male mental health and its impact on the physical body. That a supervillain origin story tackles these kinds of issues is in itself quite admirable.
Warner Bros.
Clayface also has strong echoes of David Cronenberg’s masterful and influential piece of body horror The Fly (1986). In this classic, Jeff Goldblum’s scientist accidentally connects his DNA with that of a house fowl. His transformation begins as an exciting set of new abilities before he becomes a complete physical breakdown into a grotesque creature.
Clayface aims to tread similar ground, but simply cannot replicate Cronenberg’s ability to walk the line between terror and wonder via the strange transformations of the body.
The main obstacle to Clayface’s success, however, is the surface-level characterization and very basic sketches of the supporting ensemble of cliched and cartoonish mobster types. This is most profound in the eye-rolling love story, which came in to encourage emotional connection with the central characters.
This is something The Fly manages to pull off around the horror as scientist Seth Brundle (Jeff Goldblum) and science journalist Veronica “Ronnie” Quaife (Geena Davis) fall in love and try to defy the odds against them. Theirs is an incredibly convincing performance of chemistry, which was certainly helped by the fact that the two actors are dating. Unfortunately, Clayface just can’t replicate it.
While Clayface’s most intense sequences are full of imaginative horror that only an enthusiast of the genre could imagine, his dialogue and character remain thin. The film neither offers the emotional nuances typical of Flanagan at his best, nor does it deliberately lean into the over-the-top tropes of gangsters or the mythology of comics.
Instead, Clayface falls into a passable middle ground that may be too tame for horror fans accustomed to the wild spectacle of Fargeat and Cronenberg’s work, while also overly icky and violent for comic book movie fans.
