Hunky actor Matt Hagen (Tom Rhys Harries) has crawled out of Gotham’s most deprived district to become a movie star with best friend Cory Bowers (Joshua James). A night on the town leads to tragedy, however, when he lets himself be seduced by a gangster’s moll, Mia Torrez (Joana Ribeiro). The morning after, he’s disfigured by her lover Markos Szabo (David Dencik) and his goons. A precipitous fall from fame and fortune follows, before Hagen meets Dr Caitlyn Corr (Naomi Ackie), a brilliant scientist with a serum that restores cellular structures, like remoulding wet clay…
I found Clayface underwhelming. I struggled to care about Hagen’s plight after a point, specifically when he kills an old friend whose crime seemed to be “telling the gangsters threatening them and their family where ex-classmates can be found.” Information they’d have easily gleaned anyway, given that their victim was a celebrity. The same friend who tried to warn him of his folly in the first place.
This would be fine narratively if Hagen/Clayface was actually an antihero, but although it feints towards that, this isn’t really that sort of film. He’s supposed to be tragic and relatable in the end. The characterisation isn’t strong enough to support even this, however, and the movie is weak on plot and ideas. Its visuals work, and if there were a visionary like David Cronenberg behind the wheel, it could have taken off. It is mildly engaging, though.
Its best bits are its gore. There’s a nightclub scene near the end that threatens to be great, yet never quite achieves liftoff. Again, with a visionary crafting this, or just a team let loose from the comic book studio’s no doubt constant and suffocating directives, the body horror scenes could have been integrated into a genuinely troubling and thought-provoking narrative. One where morals are genuinely grey and it’s not all on a fanboy level of emotional and intellectual involvement.
Director James Watkins and his writers Mike Flanagan and Hossein Amini are capable of producing great horror entertainment, and it’s a testament to them that this got made at all. When it comes to the comic book studios, 18-rated horror flicks that are even slightly interesting don’t tend to make it out of the starting gates before the men in suits chase them down and beat them into mediocrity. It was never really in question who’d win the fight in the end, however. There are hints throughout of a more interesting film, such as when Hagen morphs into a woman and then appears briefly in crossdress as a result.
The intangible lines between personal and gender identities could really be explored with a concept like Clayface’s, again like Cronenberg’s films used to do, depicting how technology intersects with human development to create new bodies, behaviours, ways of being. Can you imagine a big-budget comic film, with an established character and ravenous mainstream fanbase, being able (or even wanting) to deal with such themes beyond the most surface-level, though?
Rating: 2.5/5
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