‘Clayface’ Review – The DCU’s Dive Into Body Horror Lacks The Style And Focus To Shape Its Own Voice

In a film landscape where the comic book film can feel rather oversaturated and audiences are becoming pickier about which ones they choose to see, a film like Clayface is perfect for the environment not just because it’s a horror flick, but because, in a way, it’s a palate cleanser of sorts. Not every superhero flick needs to have the world-ending stakes of your Avengers: Doomsday’s, Superman’s (2025), or Justice League team-ups. Sometimes a movie can just hone in on the internal tragedy and inherent cool abilities of a character that normally wouldn’t have as much focus on a smaller scale, and from conception alone, Clayface fulfills this aspect, which makes the fact that it comes up short of living up to its full potential all the more disappointing.

Clayface is more frustrating than anything because you can see the pieces for impactful body horror mixed in with a revenge tale at its center exist but are too scattered to amount to a full experience. There’s more than a few creative bits of gore that have fun with Matt Hagen’s abilities, but the combinations of tonal confusion, flat direction, borderline-laughable dialogue, and the overwrought predictability of both its melodrama and revenge aspects weigh things down. It’s to the point where Clayface never really has a distinct identity of its own by the time the credits roll, acting as a watered-down version of other genre and body horror films that it clearly takes inspiration from.

The film gets right into the swing of things in terms of pace from its opening title card, introducing us to Matt Hagen (Tom Rhys Harries), a superstar film actor who came from nothing back in Gotham City and is now a hot commodity and fresh off an Academy Award nomination we see him live-react to. To celebrate, he heads back to his hometown of Gotham with friends, where he meets a girl named Mia (Joana Ribeiro) who he hooks up with while on the dance floor, but little did Matt know that he’d be making the biggest mistake of his life, as Mia is the partner of notorious Gotham crime boss Markos Szabo (David Dencik).

Markos and his goons make Matt pay the next morning, horribly disfiguring his face and ruining his now allegation-ridden acting career in the process, with his entire team and financial manager Frank (Eddie Marsan) completely abandoning him. With no other options left, now living out of a dingy apartment, Matt seeks out an experimental nano cell-based treatment run by Dr. Caitlyn Corr (Naomi Ackie), where, after a couple of weeks of treatment, Matt’s face miraculously looks normal again. But as he takes more of the treatment, Matt gains abilities of shapeshifting and transformation he never would’ve thought were possible, and it sends him down a destructive path of seeking revenge against all who’ve wronged him.

Even if Clayface not being able to commit to a cinematic tone is what makes the film hamper its own ambitions, there are plenty of moments that make great use of Clayface’s abilities that will be sure to satisfy fans. The goopy plights of witnessing Clayface first learn his abilities are fun to watch as he progresses through both being able to now auto heal his wounds, wincing at him cutting open his glued together eyes, or going full Sam Raimi’s Darkman via the powers allowing him to take the form of any person.

There’s the occasional bit where some CG touch-ups are silly from a visual perspective, but the effects work is the film’s strongest aspect and, at the very least, a refreshing example of digital and practical effects being used to solid effect. The film’s likely standout sequence is in a nightclub within its third act, where it fully leans into the cheese with Matt shapeshifting with ease and messing with the tormentors that nearly destroyed his life. This is where the film, despite it still being in a tonal grey area, feels the most sure of what exactly it wants to accomplish, and frankly, it should’ve let loose a lot more often.

The heart of Clayface’s issues mainly lies in its very thinly sketched screenplay, which is tonally confused in every way. Mike Flanagan is still credited as a co-writer on the project (and was initially set to direct) but in many ways, it feels like a script that was meddled with post him leaving the project with Hossein Amini also stepping in as a writer. The dialogue throughout most scenes of characters talking is, to be frank, abysmal. Tom Rhys Harries is doing solid work as Hagen and, through his facial work, delivers more shades to the character than the actual writing allows, but there’s never a moment where characters are speaking that feels like a conversation that real people would actually have. This especially rings true in scenes between Harries and Ackie when the movie tries to plant seeds of a one-sided romance between the two that couldn’t lack more chemistry or be more bizarrely implemented.

It all comes across as so perfunctory and surface-level in nature, surrounding both the deeper character moments of dysphoria and the revenge plot that the film reaches territories of straight-up boredom whenever bloody goodness isn’t unfolding. Even when you get what you came for in brutality and body horror for as many moments that are creatively gnarly, there are a couple others where the film looks away from its violence or has a beat down occur off-screen that seems ironic for a film showboating its brutality while still leaving you wanting a bit more.

Honestly, many of these flaws would be more forgivable in nature if at the very least the film itself had a distinctive identity on screen. The three films that you will likely see many compare Clayface to- The Substance, The Fly, and the aforementioned Darkman– are all impactful as body horror and genre pulp because of the visual and heavy-hitting thematic flair each of them has. No matter what potential flaws one might see in each of them, it’s hard to argue that they didn’t have a vision of what they were aiming for in tonal or cinematic dynamics. No one was expecting Cronenberg or Raimi-level theatrics, but director James Watkins can’t really do the same for Clayface as there exists virtually nothing remarkable about it visually and there’s as many knowingly cheesy sequences as there are unintentionally funny ones. This results in the film residing in a strange grey area that’s never quite awful but disappointingly middling throughout much of its runtime.

As a “baby’s first body horror flick,” Clayface should at the very least suffice, and it’s at least stronger than the doldrums of the villain-centered films that Sony Pictures has put out over the years, but the entire experience comes across as wasted potential. The solid effects work just isn’t enough to save such rote material that’s clunky in both tonal inflection and dialogue, making for a disappointing experience that can surely shapeshift into similar-feeling films but lacks the personality to shape into something unique on its own.