Clayface review – A great body-horror movie but a terrible DC Comics film

The Gotham City of Clayface doesn’t look too much like Gotham City. It’s a yellow, over-tungstened, sparsely graffitied Scorsese theme park, a little too shiny and a little too computer-generated, and bereft of shadows you’d conceivably believe someone called Bane or Poison Ivy might lurk in.

The film boasts an interesting premise, framing the origins of traditional Batman antagonist Clayface, who can mould his appearance into whatever and whomever he likes, as a body-horror tragedy. It’s a DC Comics take on Bessel van der Kolk’s famous thesis The Body Keeps the Score, in which residual trauma stores itself via physical manifestation, coupled with a breakout turn by Welsh actor Tom Rhys Harries.

Yet James Gunn and Peter Safran’s newly established DCU has shot itself slightly in the foot here by having Clayface revisit the Liverpool locations of Matt Reeves’s Robert Pattinson Batman (with the occasional side quest to Manchester). Master cinematographer Greig Fraser shot Reeves’s Gotham as a smoky, neo-noir metropolitan catacomb. But that Gotham belongs to a different universe, and this Gotham, that of the DCU, was shot by cinematographer Rob Hardy. He has as difficult a time here as he did in this summer’s flat and murky Supergirl when it comes to establishing a distinct visual language. It matters especially to Clayface because, as much as every comic book film these days claims it’s not really a comic book film, this does function relatively well as a standalone horror.

Tom Rhys Harries in ‘Clayface’ (Warner Bros)

Rhys Harries stars as Matt Hagen, pronounced by a talk show host (inexplicably Rob Brydon, another of the film’s multitude of Brits) as Gotham’s own “rags-to-riches” triumph, a kid from a difficult family in a disenfranchised part of town who’s just earned his first Oscar nomination. But he loses it all in a single night, when a mob boss carves up his face as punishment for hooking up with his girl, then drags his reputation through the dirt.

Matt turns, in desperation, to experimental scientist Dr Caitlyn Corr (Naomi Ackie) and her AI-led experimental nano cell treatment, ie the movie science explanation for why she injects a mysterious goop into his face that both heals his scars and intermittently turns his flesh into putty.

Director James Watkins has a reputation for gnarliness – his 2008 debut Eden Lake unleashed a young Jack O’Connell on a prim, middle-class couple with nothing but barbed wire and simmering resentment – and there’s a morbid thrill to how readily he allows Matt’s skin to flap around like it’s a slice of ham trying to balance on a hungry dog’s nose. The film’s practical effects have taken pride of place. One standout scene traps him in an airplane bathroom during turbulence with nothing but a pair of travel scissors and the realisation that his eyelids have fused shut.

The project was originally brought to DC by The Haunting of Hill House’s Mike Flanagan. Though his script was dramatically overhauled by Drive’s Hossein Amini, faint echoes remain of his trademark, tenderly wrought style (though without the fondness for protracted monologues). Clayface’s sequences of fused and melted body parts carry with them a light metaphorical weight, the implication they’re less the mark of direct injury, but a reminder of deeper, accumulated and unprocessed shame.

Tom Rhys Harries and Naomi Ackie in ‘Clayface’ (Warner Bros)

Rhys Harries does much of the heavy lifting here; the actor, in his first major lead role, works each scene with such wounded intensity that you could layer on a dozen more prosthetics and the performance would still leap out. He is, like Milly Alcock’s Supergirl, perfectly cast in the role. If only the DCU could give these stars a little more aesthetic bang for their buck.