Clayface is a C-list Batman villain, but Batman doesn't show up at all in the new film Clayface. Turns out there's plenty of precedent for quarantining a supervillain away from their superheroic counterpart and trying to build a movie around them. That ignoble roster includes the Joker and Venom films, alongside Morbius, Kraven the Hunter and Catwoman.
Neither is Clayface even close to the first R-rated movie set in a superheroic universe — that list is even longer: The Jokers again, the Deadpool films, the Blade films, Logan, The Suicide Squad, Dredd, The Crow and The Punisher, plus sundry "mature" meta-commentaries on the superhero archetype like the Kick-Ass films, Watchmen and Super. (It's not even the first superhero-horror mashup — some of us out here in these streets still remember The New Mutants, Brightburn and Chronicle, for our sins.)
What Clayface is, just absurdly specifically, is the first villain-centered, R-rated, body-horror movie.
What it represents to the folks running DC Studios right now is something more abstract: It is a test case. It poses the question: Is the DC Universe large enough to stretch beyond the worrisomely attenuated superhero genre in favor of something more lucrative like horror, a genre whose vise-like grip on the box office shows no sign of weakening?
The answer Clayface provides is: No. Not yet, at least.
That's because the film gets stuck, planting one of its feet of clay in horror and the other in superhero, and completely fails to move. Sure, there's plenty of gross-out body horror stuff involving blades slicing through skin, flesh, organs and eyelids. If your idea of a great night at the movies is watching too, too solid flesh melt, thaw and resolve itself into a goo, you're in luck.
But there's not enough of it to satisfy diehard fans of such seriously squelchy fare, because at its semi-solid heart, Clayface assiduously adheres to the superhero movie formula: Adversity happens. Powers manifest. Justice is served.
(It's perhaps more correct to call it a super-antihero movie formula, as it's not technically justice that gets served, but revenge.) (Revenge, as far as Hollywood is concerned, is justice with arterial spray.)
The plot is thin but effective: Matt Hagen (Tom Rhys Harries) is a hot young movie star on top of the world, until a run-in with a painfully generic mob boss (David Dencik) leaves him disfigured. Desperate for a solution, he seeks out a scientist (Naomi Ackie) who's developing an untested procedure involving nanotechnology that can merge with Matt's body. Said nanotech is powered by AI, so nothing could possibly go wrong.
Kidding: Plenty of face-melty, body-morphy, splurty-squicky-slimy hijinks dutifully ensue, and Matt metes out his loamy vengeance on all who wronged him.
Clayface's horror elements work well in the early going, when Matt starts having trouble keeping his symmetrical, Tom-of-Finland facial features from going all late-period Picasso on him. But as his superpowers manifest, the film abandons the horror of the uncanny valley for the whiz-bang of the comic book splash page. To this fan of superhero stuff, that's not a complaint, but I could sense my fellow, more bloodthirsty theater-goers growing increasingly restless.
To its credit, Clayface is not a long movie, and starts putting its pieces in place and setting them in motion immediately. The amount of time it takes for Matt's world to crumble around him, for instance, is so hilariously truncated it feels like the filmmakers were worried about our attention span.
But that pacing does make sense: Clayface isn't a character study, or a meditation on the superficiality of beauty standards and fame (though the screenplay flirts with both ideas). No, it's a revenge movie.
Scratch that, it's a revenge flick. And the flicks to which it's most deeply indebted — think Oldboy, and Kill Bill Vols. 1 and 2, and the John Wick franchise — they're not about weaving layers of characterization and parsing psychological nuance. No, they're about creating tension and releasing it as rapidly as possible. Delivering chunk after satisfying chunk of (literally) visceral thrills and catharsis.
But those other films — and Sam Raimi's 1990 film Darkman, to which this movie owes a narrative debt so huge it could wipe out several Baltic nations — all possess something Clayface lacks, which is style for days. Visual flair. Aesthetic idiosyncrasy. (And in the case of Darkman: A charming, heedless goofiness.) The Gotham of Clayface is not the mysterious, goth-inflected urban hellscape of any Batman movie you care to name, it's just … Liverpool. (DC Studios co-lead James Gunn has made it clear that director Matt Reeves' The Batman films exist separately from this DCU.)
If Clayface doesn't quite work as a proof-of-concept for DC horror as a viable ongoing concern, it's effective as an opening gambit in what will assuredly prove a long game. Like its protagonist, the film shoots out its goopy, mud-brown, protoplasmic feelers into the undiscovered territory of horror, but it does so too tentatively, and is too quick to retract them the moment it meets resistance.
And that's a shame. Clayface could have done something surprising, something new, if only it'd had the courage to go in for the kiln.
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