Clayface: Movie Review

Cast: Tom Rhys Harries, Naomi Ackie, Ruby Sear, Eddie Marsan, Max Minghella
Director: James Watkins

"The reviews are in," one character says. 

"I hope they're kind," another replies to them.

It's this kind if inadvertently meta-aware moment in Clayface that signals all that's wrong with this body horror origin tale of DC villain Matt Hagen.

(Also, the reviews will categorically not be kind to this.)

When we first meet Hagen (Harries, stoic in the face of a script that's blessed with some clunkers), his stock is rising. Nominated for an Oscar and a star in the making, the actor appears destined for greatness. But while out celebrating, he chooses to sleep with a gangster's moll (Sear), leading to a morning after confrontation that sees him disfigured after being cut up by goons, headed up by local mob boss Markos Szabo (David Dencik).

Scuttling off like The Phantom of the Opera into the backstreets, Hagen falls fast, his life in ruins, dropped by agents and Hollywood before he's even had chance to process what's happening. With nowhere to go, he turns to medical research doctor Caitlyn Corr (Ackie), whom he discovers is using cutting edge nanotechnology to try and cure illness after losing her brother.

Despite her insistence that she's not doing human trials, Hagen convinces her to take him on as a patient...

Clayface may come from prestigious heritage in terms of Haunting of Hill House and Carrie writer Mike Flanagan and Speak No Evil director Janes Watkins, but it's a resounding thud of a film that depressingly signals another bomb for DC after the unfairly maligned Supergirl left them reeling. 

Flat direction, a workmanlike script and the awful dialogue that signals what's happening rather than showing it, Clayface becomes as muddy as the melting face on its villain, played with relative aplomb and occasional blank canvas Harries.

Despite proudly shouting about its R16 rating and with some body horror close ups and scissors near eyes, it feels like the film's not secure enough to reach into darker territory to leave a lasting impression, preferring instead to deliver some lazy jumpscares, rote dialogue and action that - bar one club scene and a sequence on a plane that's likely to leave some squirming - feels non-existent.

It's a crime that this doesn't deliver - its lead, a mix of Marc Warren and Willem Dafoe, tries his best to mine the tragedy, but the ascent and descent come so fast, there's barely time to care or indeed scare. With little chemistry with Ackie and with Minghella more or less playing the same cop he did in the Saw franchise, the most frightening thing about Clayface is how much wasted potential it had as it descends into body morphing, body swapping and fakeout territory.

And Watkins knows how to get tension from little more than actors, as he did with the brilliantly unsettling Speak No Evil. Here, it feels like a film direction constrained by studios and dealt to by a committee, rather than someone given creative freedom to mine the macabre and dial up the unease.

Ultimately, Clayface is one cinematic slab of clay that should have been re-moulded in the early stages - because it's a disaster James Gunn's DC Universe could well do without.