It’s the year of Mike Flanagan and for the most part, I couldn’t be happier. We just wrapped up the Carrie remake on Amazon Prime, his Exorcist reboot trailer just dropped and looks great, and now we have Clayface: the first real horror standalone in the DC Universe. Though Hossein Amini rewrote a majority of the script and James Watkins ended up in the director’s chair, the broad strokes that made the final cut are still Flanagan’s vision for the character, although I think it may be for the better that other people took the lead on this one.
Clayface follows Matt Hagen, a rags-to-riches actor on the brink of finally winning an Oscar and cementing his influence in the industry. Hubris and a night of bad decisions though leave him unrecognizable and broke, his promising future now a distant memory. As one last Hail Mary, he reaches out to Caitlyn Corr, a nanite researcher researching tissue-repair technology. Though this seems like a perfect solution, this is a cautionary tale. What starts as a straightforward procedure quickly becomes a Monkey’s Paw, and Matt doesn’t know when to say when.
The more I’ve sat with this movie after seeing it, the more mixed I feel about Matt Hagen as a character. It’s very clear a lot was cut from his background, and not just because of all the Aaron Paul headlines. The film doesn’t give us a very clear understanding of who Matt is at the jump, beyond a nice guy who seems down-to-earth despite his fame. This shallowness weakens his transformation into Clayface, since we aren’t really sure how much of these atrocities Matt would do are motivated by revenge and how much is the nanites taking control.
On the other hand, Matt’s personality being only skin deep presents a new possibility: he is an actor in every respect. By always morphing into the roles he is given, he was shaped to never find any comfort or security in who he was by himself. I would be willing to bet this was the original intention for the story, but we’ll never know for sure. The final version is too muddy to tell.
The special effects for this film look really, really good. Despite the fantastical nature of a man being able to mold and shape his body like clay, I never doubted it while watching. This is a body horror through and through, and despite the heavy use of CG, I found myself thinking about Cronenberg and Carpenter as influences for this. All of the transformation scenes range from believable to straight-up disgusting. The eye scene on the plane is the most visceral and tense, using close-ups on some way too real-looking prosthetics for maximum effect. Really effective stuff, and they clearly had a lot of fun with it.
The story is simple, but compelling. It’s an origin story about a villain, and it doesn’t stray much from the usual formula. My main complaint is that it’s paced way too fast, especially in the first half. We set up Matt and him getting his face cut up in what feels like the first ten minutes of the film. Then he and Caitlyn meet, she refuses to treat him, and then changes her mind at the same breakneck pace. While I ultimately enjoyed the fast pace later in the film’s runtime, an extra fifteen minutes to let everything breathe would have made everything flow better.
This is a fun romp, and I hope we get more villain origin stories like this. I do still wonder what a Flanagan-penned and directed version would have looked like, but I think what we got is much tighter and faster-paced, which is a better fit for the genre. Despite its shortfalls, Clayface is a success and one I’m still going to have fun with upon rewatch.
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