Sit Down, Venom
DC/DC Studios drops one of its strongest films yet, even if it is just a placeholder. It’s also super-gross.
Clayface
Director: James Watkins • Writers: Mike Flanagan, Hossein Amini, based on characters by DC
Starring: Tom Rhys Harries, Naomi Ackie, Max Minghella, Eddie Marsan
USA • 1hr 49mins
Opens Hong Kong October 22 • III
Grade: B+
Okay, hold on to your shorts. Clayface is a DC comic-based superhero-adjacent VFX-heavy horror-fantasy (so many hyphens) about a magic serum and medical treatment that turns the hero, in this case Matt Hagen, into a mutant. Contrary to all modern Hollywood economics, Clayface was made for a paltry US$30 million. No, you’re not imagining it. I almost fell off the floor too. Strangely, director James Watkins, who made the not horrible remake of Speak No Evil, has relied on current king of horror Mike Flanagan’s script, some creative production design by James Price (Poor Things), DOP master of mood Rob Hardy (Annihilation, Civil War) and practical SFX woven into CGI for an old-fashioned Universal Pictures/Hammer Horror kind of chiller. I’m all for a big swing, but sometimes a classic B-horror-revenge romp with a ton of “Oh, damn!” moments is just the ticket.
Similarly, sometimes an actor’s looks are the key to a film’s success. No one will admit it now but we still watch movies and TV because so-and-so is a smoke show, but it’s been a while since an actor’s face was so perfectly cast that it elevated the movie from B-schlock to unexpected delight. Tom Rhys Harries plays budding superstar Matt Hagen who, after getting blasted and spending a night with Gotham City (this time played by Manchester and Liverpool) gangster Markos Szabo’s (David Dencik, Star City, Chernobyl) moll, has his money-maker mutilated. Harries is handsome in a generic square-jawed way, but not so handsome as to be alienating. It makes Hagen’s wish to just be “like he was before” come not from a place of vanity, but more to shed the pain of the mess his life’s become. That said, Harries can flit between sweet and welcoming to sinister and unhinged on a dime. With just his face. It’s the film’s best special effect.
That face won’t last long
Clayface is definitely cut more from Matt Reeves’s The Batman cloth than James Gunn’s bright, shiny Superman; both of them are producers here, so make of that what you will. It’s also one of these IP-based Major Franchise-adjacent films that studios hope we’ll all go to because Kraven or Venom or Morbius or Madame Web orbit the shit we pay for to the tune of billions. Sometimes it works (Venom), most times it doesn’t. But Clayface is worth a go if you can stomach the gooey body horror that David Cronenberg would envy.
Clayface frequently pivots on a what happens when a guy desperate for attention, to be seen, gets more attention than he bargained for. Watkins, Flanagan and co-writer Hossein Amini are also never afraid to make us wonder if Hagen is a victim to be sympathised with or a psychopath to fear. So after getting it on with the gangster’s girl, Hagen’s face is a mess (dear god, the plastic surgery), his business manager Frank Fitzgerald (Eddie Marsan) dumps him, his agency drops him and the moll, Mia Torrez (Joana Ribeiro) starts a smear campaign in Hagen’s grim, neon-accented Gotham hometown to put the final nail in his career coffin. Only his bestie, fellow Gotham kid Corey Bowery (Joshua James) is willing to talk to him. Desperate for a solution and now broke, Hagen offers himself up for human testing with Dr Caitlyn Corr (Naomi Ackie, Blink Twice), the requisite mad scientist – more ambitious than mad – whose research on reparative nano-cell/AI tech is about to be just as broke if she doesn’t find some funding. Human testing could be her solution. Cue the promising results, followed by disastrous side-effects that have Hagen running from red carpets and hiding in plane toilets during turbulence.
This Clayface is just one of the many iterations of the character in the comics over the years, which leaves the film open to sequels that wouldn’t even rely on Harries, but Clayface as it stands is a refreshing one-and-done superhero-ish thriller that benefits tremendously from its unapologetically Cat III temperament; the constant poking and prodding and peeling Hagen subjects himself to is the perfect visualisation of why horror fans love horror – why some of us love to scare ourselves. At one point Hagen’s former agent tells him dumping his scandal-plagued ass was nothing personal, that “the business is all surfaces,” and Clayface leans into that hard, be it with Hagen burying his shady past under movie star polish or Szabo trying to buy respectability with a “real” business.
But Clayface can also be taken just as a gnarly thriller that really goes off in the last act, when Hagen learns to control the nano-tech coursing through his body (for those unfamiliar with DC, Clayface can take on other people’s appearances) and takes revenge on everyone who had a hand in fucking up his life and gets Caitlyn’s (pretty boring) Gotham cop finacé John Borrelli (Max Minghella) on his case. Everything comes to glorious, (heavily) analogue head – Clayface is performance and practical effects along with sly editing, in-camera tricks, filters and exploitation of spaces, you know… filmmaking – in the nightclub where it all started, a clever and gleefully nasty game of henchman Whac-A-Mole. Best of all? It all happens without a whiff of a Batman, a Joker or a Superperson.