'Clayface' Is Horrific To Watch for All the Right Reasons | Review

If you've heard anything about Clayface, the new DCU offering co-written by horror superstar Mike Flanagan, it's probably that the film represents something new for the company: this tale of a disfigured Hollywood actor who ends up with, you know, a face made out of clay, is the first-ever DC-branded horror movie. Considering that it's been nearly 50 years since Christopher Reeve first pulled on Superman's red undies, it's impressive to find any fresh cinematic terrain the brand has yet to touch, period. But Clayface also represents another, less-talked-about first: it is the first-ever DC movie to be straight-up gross.

Please know that "gross" is meant as a compliment in this context. Clayface was positioned as DCU's entry into the body horror genre, and it delivers on this promise in every way, as protagonist Matt Hagen (Tom Rhys Harries) does indeed have a body that is horrible. Over the course of the film, his skin stretches and melts, dents and reconfigures, and is attacked with everything from bullets to nail scissors to a straight razor to a can opener. If you see it in theaters, you are almost guaranteed the experience of a few communal audience "Ewwwww"s.

On the story front, Clayface delivers much less — it's a paint-by-numbers B-movie tale about corruption and revenge that plays things completely straight-faced, even in its most bizarre moments. But hey, if you wanted the art and craft of cinematic storytelling, you'd be in the theater next door, watching Sense & Sensibility. Clayface is at its best when it accepts what it truly is: a gleefully repulsive movie that delights in imagining the grossest things that can be done to the human body. It only stumbles when, like its namesake, it wants to be something more than monstrous.

What Is 'Clayface' About?

Image via Warner Bros. Pictures

Out in Coast City, Matt Hagen (Tom Rhys Harries) is a star. After a rough childhood in the Narrows, one of Gotham City's toughest slums, Matt has found fame, acclaim, money and prestige as an actor — and he loses it all within the film's first 15 minutes, after he makes the unwise choice to toast his good fortune by partying with a mobster's girlfriend. That mobster, Markus Szabo (David Dencik), repays Matt's indiscretion by slicing his pretty face to ribbons.

No longer a hot young hunk, Matt is dropped from all his film roles; his civil case against Szabo fails and his cosmetic repair surgeries don't work. Exiled back to the Narrows, Matt is a shell of his former self, reduced to living in a roach-infested apartment and wandering around in a bizarre facial covering that's somewhere between The Phantom of the Opera and those see-through masks they sell at Spirit Halloween. Disfigured, lonely and cut off from the fan adoration that once sustained him, Matt has no idea who he is.

Enter Dr. Catelyn Corr (Naomi Ackie), part of Gotham City's long lineage of talented medical professionals who are a bit fuzzy on the ol' ethics. She's also down on her luck: though she's a scientific genius who created a new form of cellular therapy to help people living with degenerative diseases, her business partners have left her high and dry, and her lab is about to run out of funding. After Matt sees a video about Catelyn's work, he's almost immediately at her door; after roughly 30 seconds of hesitation about trying out a totally untested experimental procedure on a random dude in a mask, she agrees to let him be her guinea pig.

A few months later, thanks to Catelyn's experimental nanotechnology therapy, Matt once again looks ready to grace the cover of a J. Crew catalog, and is ready to show off his new, old face at a movie premiere red carpet. Which goes great, until his face starts melting, which is something no one can really prepare for. An attempt to fix the problem instead alters Matt further, turning him into a nearly invulnerable creature who can take on the faces of those around him, and whose body tends to mutate in unexpected ways when his emotions get the best of him.

Soon, revelations about his attack and its aftermath send Matt on a journey of revenge. This leads him to kill his enemies in ever more grotesque ways (and, in one of the film's more enjoyable recurring bits, take on the faces of others, which requires supporting actors like Eddie Marsan and Joshua James to play Matt playing their characters). At the same time, he pines for Catelyn, who is engaged to John Borrelli (Max Minghella), one of the only honest cops in Gotham City — always a dangerous thing to be.

As Matt becomes a one-man army that's half John Wick, half Videodrome, leaving a trail of bodies in his wake, his motives become blurry: is he a good man who has simply been pushed to his limit? Or does his physical rot suggest something more sinister bubbling beneath the surface?

'Clayface' Is Only Skin Deep (But That's Not Necessarily a Bad Thing)

Though Clayface is a Batman antagonist, the Caped Crusader doesn't pop up in this film. Instead, Flanagan and co-writer Hossein Amini's script serves as a stand-alone story that uses Gotham City and its aura of greed and corruption as a setting and inspiration, without bringing in any DCU heavies.

This is both good and bad: with no superheroic antics to steal the spotlight, the film can focus on pushing Matt's malleable skin to the visual limit, which it does with admirable gusto. But without any previously known characters or a larger backstory to create stakes, we're left with bare-bones characters who — despite the best efforts of Harries, Ackie, Minghella and the rest — don't ever feel especially real.

In fact, Clayface often feels like two separate films: in its action and visually focused sequences, it can feel like the scrappy kid brother of David Cronenberg's The Fly, continually pushing the envelope regarding what it can get away with. Though director James Watkins' body horror doesn't have much subtext, it is riotous fun to watch, and you're almost guaranteed at least one involuntary retch (a scene in which Matt's eyelids begin to grow together, hinted at in the trailer, is a good candidate). Not since the 2000s reign of the Hostel and Saw franchises have we seen a major studio movie unafraid to get this icky.

But in its quieter moments, Clayface plays out more like a TV police procedural, where motivations are broadly telegraphed and the emotional palette is limited. Matt is angry and sad because the life he worked so hard for has been taken from him; Catelyn bends her ethics because she feels like it will honor her dead brother, whom she could not save; Szabo does evil, mobsterish things because he is an evil mobster.

There's a way to make this kind of minimal emotional investment in the characters work, but it would require a lighter touch, and a comfort with being a movie that's all about the effects rather than the plot. But Clayface wants to have it both ways, grossing you out and getting you wound up in its characters' fates, and on that level, it never quite coheres. Harries and Ackie are both warm presences, but they lack chemistry, so it's hard to become invested in Matt and Catelyn's will-they-or-won't-they storyline; and we know so little about who Matt truly is that it's difficult to care deeply about the person his powers are turning him into.

And yet, on some level, rating Clayface on the believability of its love story feels like having a problem with Friday the 13th because you don't understand why these teens keep making out when a murderer is on the loose. Sequences like a siege at Szabo's nightclub, where Matt takes on new face after new face on his way to the mobster's office, are where the film shines — and if you're a fan of body horror, they're worthwhile enough to sit through the film's more awkward, Law and Order-esque dialogue scenes. If nothing else, Clayface is a refreshing break for those suffering from superhero fatigue — while it may not be perfect, it's absolutely something you haven't seen in a DC film before, and that alone might be enough to get you to the multiplex.

Clayface

Release Date October 23, 2026

Runtime 108 Minutes

Director James Watkins

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  Tom Rhys Harries

  Matt Hagen / Clayface

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  Naomi Ackie

  Dr. Caitlin Bates

Pros & Cons

• Director James Watkins is unafraid to push the body horror envelope in a studio film.
• The film's special effects work is inventive and gripping.
• Action sequences are dynamic and gleefully gross.

• The characters and their motivations are fairly one-note.
• Scenes without action can be a slog.