‘Clayface’ Takes the Revenge Body to a Whole New Level

It’s impossible to talk about Clayface, the character, the villain who’s part of Batman’s rogues’ gallery, without talking about his depiction in Batman: The Animated Series. And it’s hard to talk about Clayface, the new DC Studios film from director James Watkins, without talking about the shadow cast by that character-defining arc in BTAS, a standout, somehow, among not just a frankly absurd number of high points in that improbable children’s show, but among any Batman story ever told. For one thing, Clayface borrows BTAS‘ Clayface retcon, taking elements of the backstory of Basil Karlo, the first iteration of Clayface to appear in Detective Comics, and mashing them up with elements of the origin story of Matt Hagen, the second version of Clayface to grace the pages of Detective Comics. In Clayface, as in Batman: The Animated Series, Matt Hagen is a down-on-his-luck actor who seeks a way to restore his old face after he’s left with severe facial scars. But where BTAS was more concerned with Matt’s humanity, framing his transformation as a powerful and tragic metaphor for addiction, Clayface is necessarily more focused on Matt’s monstrosity. This is a revenge story, told through the lens of body horror. We’re meant to sympathize with Matt to a point, but we’re mostly meant to delight in the carnage wrought by his ever-shifting hand. In that, Clayface largely succeeds. This is a film that knows what it is—a comparatively low-budget (for a comic book movie from a major studio) genre swing—and doesn’t try to be much more than that. There’s a bit of a romantic subplot, but Clayface generally keeps a tight focus on Matt Hagen’s (Tom Rhys Harries) descent. © DC Studios/Warner Bros. When Clayface opens, Matt is at the top of his game, a successful actor who worked his way up from the Narrows in Gotham. He’s also, and this is very relevant to the plot, extremely conventionally attractive. But after he sleeps with Mia Torrez (Ruby Sear), the girlfriend of local crime boss Markos Szabo (David Dencik), Markos slices up Matt’s face with a knife as payback. It’s a gruesome and unflinching scene, and it leaves Matt with a face so severely scarred he wears a mask in public to hide the extent of his injuries. Later, Matt doesn’t hold back in describing what happened: “He cut my face off,” he says. The corrupt Gotham City Police Department and District Attorney’s Office refuse to bring criminal charges against Markos, and Matt also loses the civil suit he files against Markos. Between the reconstructive surgeries (which are, like the crime itself, gruesome and unflinching) and the court fees, Matt is left destitute, and he has to move back to a roach-infested apartment in the Narrows. But Matt finds a ray of hope in Dr. Caitlyn Corr (Naomi Ackie), who’s made a scientific breakthrough in the use of nanocells, which can repair damaged cells. However, she’s fully out of funding and on the verge of having to abandon her research. Matt volunteers to be a human test subject, even though the procedure isn’t approved for human trials. Reluctantly, Caitlyn agrees. She injects him with small doses of nanocells, which repair the damage to his face. In just a few weeks, he’s back to looking like his old self. There’s a problem, though: whenever Matt gets upset, his face starts to sort of… melt. Calming down makes everything go back to normal, but that’s not an easy thing to achieve when Matt is faced with an ever-increasing series of injustices. And then there’s the question of whether Matt even wants to calm down and who he really is at his core. © DC Studios/Warner Bros. As an actor, Matt’s job is to become other people, and he does it so often that for him, the question of “Who am I?” is less relevant than “Who do you want me to be?” His self-image is ever-changing, and that internal struggle is eventually reflected externally as his skin becomes more and more malleable. In many ways, Clayface is about Matt’s journey to self-acceptance. And to get there, he has to go through some difficult changes. The body horror won’t be enough to satisfy hardcore devotees of the subgenre, and there should be more of it, but it’ll be enough to make general audiences wince. And Watkins, directing from a script by Mike Flanagan and Hossein Amini, stages quite a few clever, uniquely disgusting scenes. The climax, in particular, is a delight, a beautifully shot and perfectly paced thrill ride. Where Clayface falls short is in its occasionally shaky visual effects (that $30 million is stretched as far as it can go) and clunky dialogue. The overall strong performances (with Harries being a particular standout) can only carry stilted conversations and exposition so far. But, to some degree, that’s not really the point of this movie. Matt’s transformation is believable and gross, and that’s all it needs. Maybe solid is the wrong word, but Clayface is, at least, something new, even if it is molded from well-worn clay. Clayface opens in theaters October 23. Want more io9 news? Check out the best movies and TV shows to stream this month and all the upcoming sci-fi, fantasy, and horror books that should be on your radar.