DC Studios is branching out. Instead of following the normal comic-book movie playbook, we’re getting a movie based on the Batman villain, Clayface. Clayface is an interesting look at what we can do when a comic-book villain gets humanized a bit. The film stars Tom Rhys Harries as Matt Hagen, an actor who is on top of the world in Gotham City. He’s on the verge of superstardom with an Academy Award nomination when his life changes in one night. After a visit to a nightclub with his friend Corey (Joshua James), Matt gets involved with the wrong girl, Mia (Joana Ribeiro). It turns out she’s the girlfriend of a powerful crime lord, Szabo (David Dencik). Matt wakes up the next day surrounded by gangsters and they take a straight razor to his face.
From the get-go, Clayface shows that DC Studios isn’t messing around. They went full-bore into the gore and violence. You can feel for Matt as the goons and Szabo take the razor to his face. Each slash feels like its going towards your own face. Tom Rhys Harries does a great job, especially in this first section of the film, underneath a mountain of prosthetics and a mask for his disfigured face. This first section of the film does a great job setting up the bottom to fall out for Matt. It feels almost like you’re watching a different movie. Then the razor blade comes out.
In his despair and desperation, Matt finds Caitlyn Corr (Naomi Ackie), a doctor with controversial nano-technology that could help fix his face. Initially, she’s apprehensive, but Matt convinces her.
A Tonal Shift But Some Insane Effects
Here it feels like the story might be turning for the better for Matt but the nano-bots that are injected into his body are reacting to his emotions. So his face is perfect looking one minute and he’s going to a premiere to show it off and then boom, his face is sagging like Laffy Taffy in the sun. Meanwhile, Matt is looking into ties between his old lawyer and Szabo, and some other things that bring Caitlyn’s fiancee, John (Max Minghella) into the story. John is a cop for Gotham City PD, who’s trying to take down Szabo but the PD has ties to him financially.
I was worried about how the effects for Matt’s drooping face would look, and I was not disappointed by the mix of CG, physical effects, and camera tricks in Clayface. As the movie goes on, the effects only look better and better. By the time Matt is shape-shifting into other people, and when we get the big reveal of what his true form is, it’s awesome. You would expect the movie to be a bit more goopy and gross for the body horror genre, but that stuff is mostly in the first half of the film. There are several moments involving scissors, a knife, and other sharp implements going a little too close to eyeballs.
As for the performances, Tom Rhys Harries is fantastic. He shifts between various forms of Matt Hagen as the story goes along and shifts back and forth as his body changes. Naomi Ackie is pretty good as Caitlyn, she gets a lot of medical jargon and scientific stuff to say, including a stupid line about how great AI is. It’s here that the script being rewritten from Mike Flanagan’s original seems to come up badly. Some of the lines are just a bit ham-fisted. The actors do their best with some of the lines but I did have to roll my eyes at some lines.
DC Has A Win With Clayface
Overall, even with some tonal shifts, the third act of Clayface is awesome. There are some cool effects and a kill that I’ve never seen in a movie before. Matt Hagen’s story as a tragic character works really well. Even through some hamfisted dialogue in the script, the performances shine through. It might be strange for the fortunes of DC Studios to ride on this small horror movie, but if this is an indication of what they’ll be doing in the future, they can succeed.
As a horror movie, Clayface works. There’s some body horror, and when Matt Hagen’s face is melting and he’s cutting or “implementing” people into his body, its at its best. That third act is worth the price of admission alone. I definitely went into the “locked in” position, sitting in the theater and never left it until the movie finished.
Clayface is definitely terrifying. This isn’t for the squeamish and it might not be your normal comic-book villain-ish film but overall, even with some tonal and script issues, this is a good continuation for DC Studios as a whole.
Clayface releases in theaters on October 23rd, 2026.
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