The state of DC on film is awful right now. This is nothing new.
Of course we all know that nothing in the past twenty years has come anywhere close to the high of The Dark Knight. Of course the Snyderverse era was a failed experiment that destroyed one of the oldest studios in Hollywood. But now that WBD is finally out of everyone’s misery and James Gunn is solidly in charge, at least we have reason for optimism, right?
Yeah, about that…
The first Batman movie under Matt Reeves’ tenure took a tortured age to make it out the door, and the sequel appears to be every bit as chronically unlucky. Sure, Superman (2025) kicked off the Gunn era with a promising start, but the subsequent Supergirl (2026) and “Lanterns” were, uh… somewhere between “underwhelming” and “divisive”. Personally, I’d argue that Craig Gillespie was the wrong choice to helm the Supergirl flick, and hiring Damon Lindelof is never a good choice on any project.
So here we are with Clayface, in which a B-tier Batman villain gets his own feature film. Nobody saw this coming. But at least Gunn/Safran finally made a good hiring decision when they agreed to go into business with horror wunderkind Mike Flanagan… who promptly fucked off to go work on half a dozen other projects.
The script was handed off to Hossein Amini, a journeyman screenwriter still best known for his work on Drive back in 2011. In the director’s chair is James Watkins, who previously directed such lukewarm horror offerings as the 2012 cinematic adaptation of The Woman in Black and the 2024 English-language remake of Speak No Evil. And remember, this is the team giving us the first movie about a Batman villain since Joker: Folie a Deux crashed and burned.
Then again, making a feature about a B-tier villain actually makes a kind of sense. After all, most A-list comic book villains were built from the ground up to be thematic/ideological foils for their ideological counterparts. Case in point: Everything about Venom — his origin story, his power set, his motivation, literally everything — was built around Spider-Man, so a standalone Venom movie without Spider-Man never made any sense. For that matter, Joker and Batman were always inextricable, one without the other has no definition at all!
But a B-tier villain doesn’t necessarily have that problem. Regardless of whether Kingpin is fighting Daredevil or Spider-Man or whomever else, it doesn’t make him less of a threat or change him in any significant way. It doesn’t matter if Solomon Grundy is fighting Green Lantern or Batman, the threat of a hulking undead monster is no less terrifying.
Clayface is a unique case in point, because there have been many radically different iterations of the character over the years, and they’ve all been exclusively associated with Batman. Indeed, the very first iteration of Clayface — name of Basil Karlo — was created by Bob Kane and Bill Finger themselves! This movie focuses on the Matt Hagen iteration of Clayface, created by Bill Finger and Sheldon Moldoff, and — as with a great many Batman villains — famously reinvented and catapulted to iconic status in the ’90s with “Batman: The Animated Series”. Indeed, the Emmy-nominated “Feat of Clay” two-parter, “Mudslide,” and “Growing Pains” are all deeply harrowing works of television for reasons that have everything to do with Clayface and nothing to do with Batman. (Seriously, I still remember watching “Growing Pains” as a kid, and I don’t know that the experience ever left me.)
And this right here is why Mike Flanagan is a genius: He knew before anyone else that Clayface is a villain who doesn’t need a hero in order to be interesting.
In most iterations of Matt Hagen that I’ve ever seen, the guy starts out as a failed actor who’s down on his luck and looking for instant success. In this movie (as played by Tom Rhys Harries), we meet Hagen moments before he gets nominated for a freaking Academy Award! Guy’s at the top of his game, right up until he makes the mistake of fucking the wrong guy’s girl. Turns out that Mia Torrez (Joana Ribeiro) is the moll for Markos Szabo (David Dencik), the kind of mobster who’s got every cop, judge, journalist, and politician in Gotham bought and paid for. Szabo takes this about as well as you’d expect and he carves up Hagen’s face with a switchblade.
Hagen proceeds to put himself through multiple surgeries and lawsuits. He gives up power of attorney. He spends every dollar he has. He puts up his apartment for collateral. Meanwhile, Szabo and his powerful friends dredge up every possible speck of dirt there is on Hagen to smear him in the press. And Hagen can’t or won’t appear publicly to defend himself or take any kind of acting gig.
By the time the dust has cleared, Hagen is alone, dead broke, and still disfigured, while Szabo and his associates are walking free of all charges. And then we meet Dr. Caitlyn Corr, played by Naomi Ackie.
(Side note: With the sole exception of Matt Hagen himself, I’m pretty sure every character in this movie was invented for the film. I can’t find any evidence that any of these characters were ever in the comics or in any previous television adaptation. I suppose that gave the filmmakers more leeway for killing and/or maiming these characters, which is kind of necessary in a horror flick.)
Dr. Corr is a scientific genius who devoted her life to curing degenerative diseases. The solution she came up with is a kind of cellular nanomachine that uses AI to imitate embryonic stem cells, effectively regrowing and repairing missing or damaged tissues. For obvious reasons, this tech is still highly experimental, and she was recently screwed out of the money and resources to engage in further trials. A desperate Hagen volunteers himself as a human test subject and things only get worse from there.
Getting this out of the way, yes, this movie takes place in Gotham. No, we never even get a passing mention of Batman or Bruce Wayne or Commissioner Gordon or anyone else associated with the character. That said, I really do love the dark and grimy design of Gotham in this movie. It feels grounded enough to feel lived-in and yet heightened enough to feel like a place where Batman would hang out. If this is the Gotham of the new DC megafranchise moving forward, I’m good with it.
That aside, I was pleasantly surprised by some of the character choices made in this picture. Granted, Szabo is a one-dimensional asshole gangster from start to finish, no surprises there. And Hagen’s business manager is played by Eddie Marsan, so we already know he’s a shitweasel.
But then we have characters like Mia, who gets a few fleeting moments to show that she really does have some measure of empathy. There’s also John Borrelli (Max Minghella), Caitlyn’s fiance and a detective in the GCPD. What’s interesting about John is that he’s a deeply cynical asshole who assumes everyone is guilty until proven innocent, but that’s not because he’s a crooked cop or even a bad cop. It’s because he’s a sincerely well-intentioned cop who’s worked too long in this corrupt city and gotten burned too many times.
And I had a bit of a soft spot for Corey Bowery (Joshua James), the lifelong best friend who clings to Hagen so he can get laid and wasted right alongside his famous best friend. But the twist here is that the worthless leech isn’t a significant part of Hagen’s downfall. Indeed, it’s Corey who straight-up tells Hagen who Mia is and how stupid it would be to make a move on her, and Hagen damns himself by blowing off the warning.
Then there’s Dr. Caitlyn Corr herself. What’s interesting about her is that she’s not a mad scientist. She genuinely wants to conduct herself and her business in a safe and ethical manner. She knows how inherently dangerous this experiment is and she’s doing everything she can to advance her research without completely letting the genie out of the bottle. In this conflict of bad versus evil (i.e. Hagen versus everyone who ever wronged him), Corr persistently tries to be the voice of reason holding everything stable. Unfortunately, she’s dealing with Matt Hagen.
What strikes me about this particular iteration of Clayface is that he’s not interested in getting any shortcut to fame or fortune. He isn’t primarily motivated by money or material goods. He doesn’t seem particularly arrogant or vain, any more than the next guy who’s worried that his face is literally sliding off his skull.
From where I’m sitting, it looks like everything about Hagen’s downfall can be traced back to ambition and loneliness. This is an actor who got to where he is by putting 100 percent of his mind, body, and soul into everything he does. Hagen does not know anything about moderation, and he’s never listened to anyone who ever told him he can’t do something. I might add that Hagen was lonely and horny enough to knowingly bang a mob boss’ girlfriend in open defiance of every warning sign. And that was before he lost all his friends and met the beautiful scientific genius who’s literally got her face in his for long stretches at a time.
As far as I can tell, Hagen only took up revenge because the side effects had gotten past the point where he could do anything else. If he ever had any hope of getting his acting career back, there’s every reason to believe he would’ve left Gotham and Szabo in the rearview mirror. But once it becomes obvious that revenge is all he has left, and his newfound shapeshifting abilities give him the chance to act like never before, he’s immediately and totally into it. With no regard for what if anything comes afterward, of course.
So, what about the effects? What about the action and the horror? Well, I was pleasantly surprised to see that there was no ostentatious shapeshifting effect. When Hagen takes a new form, it literally happens in the blink of an eye. Believe it or not, this doesn’t take away from the film’s spectacle in any way. In fact, precisely because the effect is so fast and so seamless, Hagen’s transformations are cleverly used for fight scenes and horror sequences without dragging down the pacing or energy.
I need hardly add that the shapeshifting conceit lends itself to some neat surprises and plot twists. Even in those moments when we can tell it’s Hagen in disguise, that doesn’t make the scene any less unsettling (sometimes, in fact, even more so). The conceit also means that pretty much everyone in the supporting cast gets a turn at playing Matt Hagen, which is honestly quite satisfying to watch.
Then there’s the body horror aspect. For half the film, Hagen is struggling with the side effects in a way that’s as terrifying as it is gut-churning. Sure, it’s a far cry from The Substance or even Together, but I can respect the filmmakers for finding clever ways to work within the studio mandates. (Let’s be real, no way were we getting Titane-level gross-out horror in a comic book movie.) For instance, the trailers have already spoiled the moment when Hagen’s eyelids meld together and he has to cut them open. That situation is horrifying enough. But trying such a delicate operation while on an airplane going through massive turbulence is a whole ‘nother level of terrifying that’s got nothing to do with an R rating.
More to the point, Hagen gets up to speed somewhere around halfway through the runtime. That’s when Hagen can start to reliably control his abilities, which means that his gross-out horror moments have now been weaponized for his supervillain revenge spree. That is at once empowering, subversive, and outright horrifying. It’s great fun to watch.
But then we have the ending. While the ending isn’t necessarily a deal-breaker, it definitely smells of a last-minute studio-mandated rewrite for the purpose of keeping the character franchisable and viable in future movies. And sure, it’s been firmly established that Clayface has gone so far past his established parameters that anything could theoretically be plausible. All the same, the ending still feels like a cheap cop-out.
Moreover, given that Clayface himself is the only character based in the comics and this film is such an early success in the fledgling DC megafranchise, I question how and whether this movie could viably be a foundational piece of the megafranchise moving forward. Imagine how different the MCU would’ve turned out to be if Thor’s slot in 2011 had gone to Man-Thing instead.
Simply put, Clayface would’ve been a far better movie if it hadn’t been made and marketed as a franchise tentpole. With a reported budget somewhere in the ballpark of $40 million, everyone should’ve been happy to call it a mid-budget one-shot and let the filmmakers swing for that hard-R body horror. And yet, even with the filmmakers pulling their punches, the character drama and psychological suspense more than make up for the deficit of action and horror, relative to other recent movies in this lane. (To wit, just imagine if Radio Silence or Nia DaCosta had gotten this job instead.) What’s more, the filmmakers take full advantage of the premise, cleverly utilizing our shapeshifting protagonist in ways that superbly elevate what action and horror we get.
And all of this is powered by dynamic performances from Tom Rhys Harries and Naomi Ackie. This is hardly groundbreaking cinema, but we never needed it to be and we never should’ve expected it to be. In fact, it’s miracle enough that a freaking Clayface movie turned out to be legitimately good! This is absolutely worth checking out, but you won’t miss much if you decide to wait for home video.
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