DC Studios just made a hard-R body-horror tragedy out of a B-list Batman villain — and the gore is only half the reason it works. This Clayface review digs into the body horror that makes it work.
By The Cinephile — CelebnMusic247
Here is the bet Clayface makes in its first act: you will care about Matt Hagen before you watch him melt. Tom Rhys Harries plays Hagen as a rising Hollywood actor — Oscar-nominated, per the film’s setup — whose face, and with it his career, is destroyed by a Gotham crime boss. A cutting-edge treatment restores his looks at a terrible cost, and director James Watkins, working from a screenplay by Mike Flanagan and Hossein Amini, turns that premise into a revenge tragedy wearing a superhero costume it keeps trying to tear off.
The horror is the headline, and it delivers. Collider’s Gabrielle Moss called the film “gross” — and meant it as a compliment: across the film, Hagen’s 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, per Collider via Just Jared. That practical-effects commitment is the movie’s engine. This desk’s verdict: the transformation sequences are the best sustained body horror in a studio film in years, precisely because the movie never lets you forget whose body it is.
Clayface review: where critics split
The divide among critics is real, and it is about the drama between the gore. The film sat at 75% on Rotten Tomatoes from 89 reviews as of Oct. 21, per Just Jared. ScreenCrush’s Matt Singer argued that as a tragic character study it never digs below the surface, even as the icky horror gets under your skin. The Associated Press’s Mark Kennedy landed warmer, calling it a surprisingly good revenge thriller-romance and a crowd-pleaser. Rolling Stone’s David Fear was the outlier, dismissing it as flavorless. Our take sits between AP and ScreenCrush: Naomi Ackie, as the doctor whose professional relationship with Hagen curdles into something conflicted, gives the middle hour the emotional pulse the script only sketches — her scenes with Harries are why the ending lands at all — but the nightclub climax is strangely underpowered for a film this ferocious elsewhere, and there are no mid- or post-credits scenes, per review coverage, so don’t wait around.
Who is it for? Horror fans first — this is a hard R that earns it — then DC fans curious how far the new DCU will bend. Casual superhero audiences expecting quips should know what they’re buying.
Verdict: ★★★★ out of 5 — a gloriously gross, genuinely tragic villain origin whose practical effects and two lead performances carry a script that occasionally plays it safer than its monster does.
Oscar worthy: not this one — the makeup and prosthetics team deserves a real craft conversation, but a 75% critical split and a soft climax keep it out of the Academy’s likely line of sight.
Sources: Just Jared (review roundup: Collider, ScreenCrush, AP, Rolling Stone, The Independent) | ComingSoon
