If there’s one medium which can capture, explore and analyse the deeply troubling issues of identity, human form and how society’s acceptance can infiltrate interior connection with such concepts, it’s cinema. Bringing a thematic script to a spectacle assisted by editing and special effects, filmmaking can deliver inspections of how our understanding of ourselves can easily be tampered with and the lengths we can go to soothe any subsequent ache in numerous forms, such as the Surrealist experimental, the drama, the horror and now, in an interesting change in approach, the superhero genre. Taking on an intriguing merge with the previously mentioned horror genre, the comic book adaptation film Clayface is consistently branded as DC’s first horror film, taking on new forms, ideas, tones and messaging within the heavily established genre to bring some new blood to the classification.
Eden Lake and Speak No Evil director James Watkins‘ fifth feature is the third installment in James Gunn and Peter Safran’s brand new DCU, which began with Gunn’s own Superman, followed by Craig Gillespie’s Supergirl.Now, Clayface comes from a screenplay inspired by the 1940 and 1961 original comics Basil Karlo and Matt Hagen, exploring numerous captivating concepts and genres. Such a script has been penned by Mike Flanagan and Hossein Amini, the former known in the horror genre for The Haunting of Hill House, Carrie and the upcoming The Exorcist: Martyr, and the latter coming in with experience in the thriller/crime genres, such as The Two Faces of January and Our Kind of Traitor.
Birthed from a collaboration of these genre contexts and source materials, Clayface additionally reads as taking onThe Picture of DorianGrey’sconcepts, alongside the body horror ofThe Substanceand the science-and-romance shake-up ofThe FlyandFrankenstein, all tailored to the superhero genre taking place in Batman’s world.
The film stars The Gentlemen actor Tom Rhys Harries in the titular role, previously known as Matt Hagen, alongside Mickey 17’s Naomi Ackie as scientist Caitlyn and Max Minghella in his second on-screen appearance as a cop following 2021’s Spiral: From the Book of Saw.Additional stars include David Dencick, Eddie Marsan, Nancy Carroll, and Joshua James.
Clayface’s premise follows Hagen, a rising movie star adored for his charm and good looks, who falls victim to a horrific facial disfigurement at the hands of a Gotham mob boss and so suffers his career slipping away. Desperate and isolated, he seeks restoration via a scientific experiment, which has disastrous results as Hagen’s weapon morphs into a deadly weapon, alongside his psychological state deteriorating.
Hagen’s new skin in Warner Bros’ Clayface
Watkins’ turn with the new DC film world immediately juxtaposes the previous installments and their colour, vibrancy, hope and joy. Instead, this film consistently threads the injustice and corruption plaguing Gotham City and stripping the city and film of these aforementioned concepts, resonating with the justice system’s seedy underbelly and revolts as depicted in Matt Reeves’ The Batman. There is an additional piling on of physical gore and terrifying bodily mutations and murders, making for a whole pivot in the DCU you have to sink your teeth into.
Thanks to a committed and German Expressionist-inspired visual composition created by production designer James Price, Clayface’s set design positions the film’s tonal form head-on, capturing the grit and grime of the fictional comic book city through stark shadows, muted brown hues and endless night skies. Everything there feels cold, amplifying the darkness and hopelessness needed to surround the central character to bring forth his dark side.
There are shallow, fleeting and physically neglected symbols attempting to imply justice in Gotham captured onscreen, yet when people’s lives are torn apart by cruelty, the city mocks their wounds with endless salts as it leaves them in the cold.
This isn’t exactly a place David Corenswet’s Superman would feel at home in.
When Matt Hagen is living the high life thanks to his good looks and star career, his surroundings and resources are nothing short of a utopia. The second the knife hits his skin and he is left a physical anomaly, there is no corner he can turn to for safety, acceptance and humanity; whether it’s the larger-scale absence of good-heartedness in the justice system which betrays him or the Gotham citizens whipping his body with their judgemental, horrified gazes, Watkins’ direction covers all scopes of how people are stripped of their humanity.
What Hagen is robbed of in Warner Bros’ Clayface
Interestingly, Hagen is robbed of societal acceptance and healthy emotional well-being by the lack of humanity he sees in others, prompting his downward spiral into villainy and monstrous acts, as he was already made to feel scarcely human anyway. Thus, Flanagan and Amini’s script turns to the comic book genre to challenge us on the inability to be allowed to feel human in such a surface-level world when you don’t align with standards, alongside how it can be the perception and judgment of others in which our own identity is framed.
Due to Hagen’s fleeting career as an actor being a crucial component, these same ideas are swiftly linked to the part Tinseltown plays in distorted identity and injustice. A motif throughout the film is “who is the real Matt Hagen?”, originally positioned to do with his work as an actor taking on so many diverse roles, later expanding to his newfound villainy of morphing his appearance.
Flanagan’s original script was a piece attempting to explore “mythic things within the shape-shifting world of [Hagen]. Questions of our humanity — how we lose our humanity and what it means to be a monster,” something captured in the final product as barely anyone depicted onscreen can be deemed wholly good and trusting of anyone seems far-fetched and dangerous.
What playing God does to Hagen in Warner Bros. Clayface
As for the more theatrical and visual elements of the body horror, makeup designer Nicole Stafford and a visual effects team led by Angus Bickerton control the audience’s eyes to widen in shock and then be averted in fear as Hagen’s face and body are corrupted by his lab-grown new flesh. The clay, which has stolen Hagen’s skin, and eventually his sanity, can twist and ripple and send shivers along our own, making for a unique cinematic comic rendition rollercoaster. We squeam and cry out when being forced to bear witness to the lengths Hagen goes to in understanding and controlling what his body can now do, with bright bloody reds, overly stretched or sliced skin and exposed muscle infecting the screen.
Additionally, there’s a rhythmic portion of carnage as the bloody result of the titular character’s revenge, which allows for the creators’ imaginations to run wild and the audience to join Hagen in the satisfaction of finding their own justice in a landscape which works tirelessly to deprive you of it naturally. We never know Hagen’s next move in his bloodlust, shaking and shivering as the tension piles on, with Hagen finding new heights of his bodily distortions as he optimises his flesh’s new form as a deadly weapon.
Such onscreen highlights are amplified by some stellar and captivating camerawork carried out by Watkins and cinematographer Rob Hardy, with the camera scoping out Hagen’s transformations head-on and centring his growing body count right up close and centre so audiences don’t miss a single grizzly detail.
Any initial hesitation towards a comic book adaptation venturing into horror can be curbed upon realisation that the world Batman as a whole holds some soft horror or thriller elements, especially how bodily distortions and corruptions are the exact recipe for a solid amount of the Dark Knight’s villains.
Hagen is pushed to extreme measures in Warner Bros’ Clayface
As for the more psychologically-driven horror, a blinding, festering quest for brutal revenge is laced against a dark, twisted and bruised misidentification of ‘love’ which is in fact an obsession. Hagen seeks light in his newly-formed darkness in the presence of his doctor, who in a lot of ways has given him new life. In an upcoming exclusive interview with Soundsphere, director Watkins touches upon this tainted romance as corrupted and inverted due to Caitlin’s position above Hagen as his doctor, establishing what should be a power play, yet Hagen takes the reins and makes sure to get his heart’s desire no matter the dark cost. Here, we see more Cronenberg and Frankenstein influence in Watkins’ hybrid piece, witnessing the mind and heart-bending and crumbling alongside the meat of the body.
In additional relation to Frankenstein, Clayface thrives thematically as it treats us to examinations of science being pushed to new lengths for human desire. People play God, corrupt natural DNA and tamper with what we know as human under the goal of helping someone feel human again. Your brain is picked at via conceptual illustrations just as much as your eyes are assaulted via visual horror.
Watkins’ Clayface achieves a great deal as both a horror and a comic book flick. It’s dark, enthralling, insightful and entertaining, with performances that fully immerse themselves in the story and a great inclusion of its setting city being placed as a vessel for plot development and character representation. We are tossed about by the pacing, which clearly seeks to emphasise both sides of the coin, yet the film’s ambitious and powerful strides in messages and genre experimentation take full control.
(Soundsphere Rating: 4/5)