Clayface: things are about to get hella ugly
An actor loses his face, his career and, ultimately, himself. Clayface is a disturbing body-horror journey through Gotham’s darkest depths. It’s gruesome, tragic – and good.
Don’t worry, this film review contains zero spoilers. I won’t be revealing anything beyond what’s already in the public domain or been shown in trailers. Clayface hits theatres on 22 October and is rated R (for audiences aged 16 and over in the US).
Gotham City is a dump. A city where corruption runs way into the upper echelons of society and politics, criminals rule the streets and justice is, at best, a money matter. Anyone who goes off the rails in this city is in for a rough time. An even worse one if they mess with the wrong people.
Matt Hagen (Tom Rhys Harries) will learn this the hard way. Although everything started out so well for him. Through a mix of talent and ambition, the young actor has worked his way up from humble beginnings on the streets of Gotham to Hollywood. He’s young, attractive and successful. A rising star whose name is on everyone’s lips.
Source: Warner Bros.
Then he makes a stupid mistake – and loses face. Literally.
What is Clayface about?
All Matt wants to do is celebrate his success. He meets an attractive woman at a nightclub, starts flirting with her and ends up spending the night with her. The problem is, her boyfriend is feared mob boss Markos Szabo (David Dencik). Matt knows this. But the arrogance of youth makes him feel invincible.
A fatal mistake. Szabo has him brutally beaten, disfiguring his face beyond recognition. Slicing and dicing it, basically. But that’s not all. Using his connections and a targeted smear campaign, Szabo ensures that Matt loses his career too. Overnight, he goes from celebrated young star to social pariah.
His last hope? A scientist (Naomi Ackie) who’s working on an experimental method of regenerating human tissue. As it turns out, she manages to restore Matt’s face. But the treatment has side effects that nobody could’ve predicted.
At this point, the real horror begins.
Gotham devours its own children
The Joker. The Penguin. The Riddler. Two-Face. Batman’s Rogues Gallery is one of the most famous in comic book history. Clayface, on the other hand, will probably be unknown to almost everyone besides die-hard comic readers. And yet, this living, breathing clay monster is one of the Dark Knight’s most tragic adversaries. You see, behind that disfigured mask isn’t simply a villain intent on terrorising Gotham, but a broken man whose own fate has become his undoing.
Interestingly, Clayface wasn’t a monster at all when he first appeared in 1940. Back then, it was simply masked actor Basil Karlo, who became a murderer out of revenge. It wasn’t until later comic book versions that he was depicted as a shape-shifting creature whose body appears to consist of a mud-like substance. One of these versions is Matt Hagen, whose tragic story director James Watkins is now bringing to the big screen as a body horror film.
And what a horror film it is.
Source: Warner Bros.
The thing I particularly like about Clayface is the way Watkins consistently anchors his story in this decaying Gotham. It’s the city’s dark aesthetic and pervasive corruption that strongly remind me of Matt Reeves’ The Batman. The police, the judiciary, politics – everything is for sale. You can’t even bank on justice being done in court.
Matt doesn’t stand a chance in this world. Of course, he’s no angel. It’s his youthful recklessness and arrogance that gets him into trouble in the first place. But what Szabo does to him is so disproportionately cruel that I can’t help but suffer along with him.
Watkins makes me suffer too. Rather than rushing from one shocking moment to the next, he gives Matt enough room to be a human being. To make us relate to his despair. His anger. His growing hatred for everyone who destroyed him. Eventually, I almost find myself wishing he would get his revenge.
Almost.
Please, not the scissors in the eye!
Then there’s the body horror element. My goodness. If you’re familiar with David Cronenberg’s The Fly, you’ll have a fairly good idea of what to expect. Clayface, however, takes that and adds in a healthy dose of Gotham madness. Bodies contort, skin melts and flesh fuses together. For Matt, his own body becomes an unpredictable threat. Rather than worrying about the handsomeness of his face, it’s staying in control of it that’s the problem.
There’s a particular scene that’s burned itself into my brain. Matt is sitting in the aeroplane toilet during a turbulent flight when his eyelids start melting shut. It starts off slowly, then gets worse and worse until the skin fuses together. Panic-stricken, he grabs a pair of scissors and tries to cut the tissue back open – all while the plane is shaking and rattling. As I’m watching, I’m just thinking, «Please, please don’t go and stab yourself in the eye now too!»
Naturally, the camera focuses right on it. On the way-too-small scissors. On the skin. On the shredded flesh, which Matt tears rather than cuts. Nothing’s made more palatable, nothing’s glossed over. As if that scene weren’t bad enough, Watkins intensifies Matt’s bodily decay as the film goes on. What starts out as a grotesque skin disease gradually turns into a nightmare of goo, blood, bones, teeth and human tissue.
Gross.
Source: Warner Bros.
This grisly factor is mostly achieved by Watkins’ surprisingly frequent use of practical effects and make-up. CGI provides a little help when needed, but I see a few examples of this digital trickery a little too clearly. Most of the time, though, these body distortions seem so disturbingly physical that I can’t decide whether I want to look closer or look away.
Kudos!
A monster I actually want to like
But none of this would be half as effective without Tom Rhys Harries. Until now, the Welsh actor hasn’t really been on my radar. Having seen Clayface, that’s definitely changed. You see, Harries doesn’t just play a man who slowly turns into a monster. He plays a desperate man, clinging with all his might to the life that’s been taken from him. But the more he fights for it, the further it slips from his grasp. It’s a tragic course of events that, despite its increasing gruesomeness, never fails to move me.
Source: Warner Bros.
However, this is precisely where my main point of criticism lies. Matt spends a long time directing his anger towards people who barely have a shred of decency. It reminds me a little of John Wick: Sure, brutal vigilantism is morally questionable. But hey, they killed his dog! We viewers were happy to turn a blind eye to that.
And for me, it’s the same story with Matt. When Matt’s cruelty is directed at his tormentors, who are no better (or even worse) than him, Clayface makes it too easy for me to excuse his behaviour. It isn’t until late in the film that I’m forced to seriously question my sympathy for Matt. Which is too bad. With a tragic character like this, Watkins could’ve trusted us viewers to handle a little more moral conflict.
You could even say he should have.
In a nutshell
The monster behind the face
Clayface doesn’t tell a particularly new story. Tragic monsters, failed experiments and bloody vendettas are all long-established, familiar tropes. That said, James Watkins has taken these tropes and turned them into such a gripping body horror that I couldn’t care less about this lack of novelty. His Gotham is devoid of morality, his special effects are disturbingly convincing and Tom Rhys Harries imbues the monster with the very humanity that makes his story so tragic.
A little more moral tension would’ve done the film some good. Still, the fact that this dark, unflinching horror takes place in the same DC Universe as James Gunn’s hopeful Superman is pretty crazy. Evidently, not every DC film has to save the world. Sometimes, seeing a man desperately trying to protect his own face – or keep it at all – is enough.
I write about technology as if it were cinema, and about films as if they were real life. Between bits and blockbusters, I’m after stories that move people, not just generate clicks. And yes – sometimes I listen to film scores louder than I probably should.
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