Clayface Review: A Brutal, Beautiful Tragedy Beneath the Monster

Spoiler-free review. Katrina Lee attended the October 20 Los Angeles critics’ screening.

I walked out of Clayface trying to find the right comparison, and the one that stuck was not a comic book or a monster movie. It felt like a Mike Flanagan story. Brutal, beautiful, empathetic. That is not a coincidence, since Flanagan shares screenplay credit, but it is still a surprise to see a DC Studios release wear its heart this openly. The trailers promised a monster. What the film actually delivers is a tragedy with a monster inside it.

The man before the clay

Matt Hagen, played by Tom Rhys Harries, is a Gotham movie star who clawed his way up from the Narrows. We meet him after the fall. His face has been carved up in an attack, the people he trusted have turned on him, and his court case has collapsed. The industry that built him does what industries do with damaged goods: it recasts him and moves on. Later, once he is worth something again, one of the people who dropped him sums up that worldview in four words: “This business is all surface.”

That is where Caitlin comes in, a scientist who has been struck off the medical register and whose startup was supposed to cure degenerative disease before the funding ran dry. She has an experimental nanocell treatment that has never been tested on a person. He has nothing left to lose and says so. The deal they make is desperate on both sides, and the film is honest about that from the first scene they share.

For a while it works. Better than works. His face comes back, the agents come back, the invitations come back. Then his body stops obeying him. The changes come on their own, and they come hardest when he is angry, which means they come hardest when he thinks about his past. That is the engine of the movie, and I am going to leave it there.

A horror film about being seen

What makes Clayface land is that it understands exactly what Matt lost, and it is not just skin. The film is built on the connection between performance, appearance, celebrity and self-worth, and it refuses to pretend those things can be separated. Early on, Matt describes acting as a way of taking pain and humiliation and making something good out of them. “You make something good out of something ugly.” The film then spends the rest of its runtime asking what happens to a person who built his entire self on that bargain when the face he performs with is taken away.

Watch how the movie strips him down, one layer at a time. The career goes first. Then the face. Then the relationships, the ones that were real and the ones he only thought were real. By the time the nanocells begin rewriting him, the question is no longer whether Matt Hagen can be saved. It is whether there is a Matt Hagen left to save. That is the psychological horror here. Losing your body is a nightmare. Losing the person inside it, slowly, while everyone around you applauds the comeback, is worse.

This is also a film with sharp things to say about the business it depicts. Gotham’s entertainment world treats Matt as disposable the moment he stops being pretty, then welcomes him back the moment he is pretty again, and the film lets you sit with how little any of those people ever saw of him. He wanted to be seen, loved and recognized. What he got was looked at.

Empathy without absolution

Here is the thing I keep coming back to. Clayface invites you to feel for Matt Hagen, fully, and it earns that. You understand the rage. You understand why a man who was betrayed, mutilated and then told the system was never going to work for him might start to believe the only justice available is the kind he makes himself. The film never lets you off that hook.

But it never asks you to excuse him either. As his body changes, his actions get darker, and the movie does not flinch from that or soften it. This is the Flanagan DNA I felt most strongly: the insistence that you can hold compassion for someone and horror at what they do in the same hand, without one canceling out the other. It is a tragedy disguised as a monster movie, and the disguise slips exactly when the film wants it to.

Harries has to carry all of this, and the role asks him to be a movie star, a wounded man, a patient, a comeback story and something else entirely, often within the same scene. By the end I had stopped thinking of Clayface as a villain-of-the-week and started thinking of him as a person I had watched disappear. If that is what they were going for, this is the performance of a lifetime.

Credit where it is due behind the camera. Clayface is directed by James Watkins from a screenplay by Mike Flanagan and Hossein Amini, based on a story by Flanagan, and whatever the division of labor was, the result has a single, confident point of view about who this man is and why his story is worth telling.

Comics, briefly

Matt Hagen has been a DC Comics Clayface since 1961, and a lot of viewers will know him best from Batman: The Animated Series and its two-part “Feat of Clay,” where a disfigured actor’s dependence on a miracle treatment ends about as well as you would expect. The film takes the broad shape of that idea and builds something new on it rather than retracing it, so do not go in expecting a beat-for-beat adaptation. We will dig into the comics history, with spoilers, in a separate piece later this week.

Verdict

Clayface is the rare superhero-adjacent film that cares more about the person than the powers. Brutal where it needs to be, beautiful more often than it has any right to be, and empathetic to the last frame, it is a monster movie that made me grieve for the monster. Go in spoiler-free, and go in soon.

The Nerd Wire verdict: See it. Then come back and talk to us about it.

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