TL;DR: Clayface swaps superhero formula for gooey, R-rated body horror, powered by a breakout Tom Rhys Harries performance. Its ideas don’t always stick, but its gross-out thrills absolutely do.
I have a confession: the phrase “villain origin story” usually makes my eyes glaze over faster than a third-act CGI sky beam. We’ve seen the tragic backstory, the slow corruption and the inevitable costume reveal so many times that the formula feels like a loading screen. Clayface surprised me by not caring much about that formula. DC Studios has made something closer to a nasty midnight horror flick than a superhero prequel. It’s sticky, mean, frequently funny and far more confident than I expected from a movie about a man whose face turns to putty.
The setup is lean. Matt Hagen, played by Tom Rhys Harries, is an actor at the top of his game, freshly nominated for Best Actor and riding a victory lap through his hometown of Gotham City. Talk shows, VIP clubs, adoring crowds, the full celebrity package. Then Gotham does what Gotham always does, and Matt ends up with a ruined face and a collapsing career. His last resort is a struggling scientist, played by Naomi Ackie, whose AI-driven nanotech research has been abandoned by its investors, and who reluctantly accepts him as her first human test subject. You can probably guess that the trial doesn’t stay on protocol for long.
Tom Rhys Harries makes a melting man impossible to look away from
The whole film rests on Harries, and he carries it with real swagger. The early stretch has a specific job: convince you that this guy genuinely could be Hollywood’s next big thing, so the fall actually hurts. Harries nails that charm quickly, and it pays off when his features start sliding into grotesque new shapes, because the panic and vanity still read clearly underneath all the goo. It’s a physically demanding, emotionally slippery performance, and it feels like a proper breakout for an actor who has been working steadily for years without the spotlight he deserves here.
Comic fans will notice the film abandons Hagen’s classic origin of a treasure hunter stumbling into a toxic pool. Making him an actor instead isn’t entirely new, since Batman: The Animated Series famously took a similar route in “Feat of Clay,” but tying his transformation to tech and vanity gives this version a modern sting. Ackie is a smart counterweight as the scientist whose motives stay murky, especially once her work starts looking genuinely revolutionary. Their uneasy partnership is the emotional spine of the movie, and the script keeps you guessing about who is using whom. By the end, the moral lines become much clearer, though I appreciated that the film never makes either character fully comfortable to root for.
James Watkins and Mike Flanagan go straight for the gag reflex
Director James Watkins, the man behind Eden Lake and the Speak No Evil remake, clearly enjoys making audiences squirm. The body horror arrives early, through reconstructive surgery and then the first stages of Matt’s transformation, and it rarely lets up. Working from a script by Mike Flanagan and Hossein Amini, Watkins embraces the R rating and treats each mutation as a showpiece. The vibe sits somewhere between Re-Animator’s gleeful splatter and The Substance’s obsession with fame and flesh, with a dash of Death Becomes Her’s cruel Hollywood humour. Some of the best moments made me want to cringe and laugh at the same time, which is exactly the sweet spot this kind of movie should chase.
The film blends revenge thriller and a murder mystery told from the killer’s side, and that mix keeps the momentum sharp across its 108 minutes. It’s not flawless. There are moments where the effects feel held back, likely due to budget, and you can sense the movie wanting to go bigger than it can afford. It also tries to say something meaningful about performance, identity and Hollywood’s appetite for faces, but those ideas never land as hard as the slime does. When Clayface leans into the gross and the ridiculous, it’s thrilling. When it tries to be profound, it gets a bit murky.
A DCU movie that barely bothers with the DCU
Here’s the most interesting part from a franchise perspective: Clayface barely acknowledges it belongs to James Gunn’s shared universe. Apart from the Gotham setting and a few Easter eggs for sharp-eyed fans, there’s no Batman waiting in the shadows and no setup for a crossover. Personally, I think that’s its biggest strength. Too many superhero spinoffs feel like DLC for a bigger game, but this one plays like a standalone indie horror title that happens to share a map with Batman.
That restraint keeps the focus squarely on Matt’s descent and his twisted bond with the scientist who created his new form. With producers including Gunn, Peter Safran and Matt Reeves, it’s notable that the studio allowed something this weird and self-contained to exist. If this is DC testing whether genre-first stories can succeed under its banner, it’s a promising experiment. Whether Clayface ever faces the DCU’s Dark Knight feels almost irrelevant once the credits roll.
Verdict
Clayface is a slimy, entertaining surprise that turns a C-list Batman villain into the anchor of a proper horror movie. Tom Rhys Harries gives a magnetic performance, Naomi Ackie offers a strong, ambiguous counterpart, and James Watkins delivers body horror that earns both gasps and laughs. Its attempts at Hollywood satire and deeper themes feel underdeveloped, and budget constraints occasionally dull the impact. Still, horror fans, Cronenberg-curious viewers and anyone tired of cookie-cutter superhero origins should catch it in cinemas from October 23. Those expecting a cape-heavy DCU event should adjust expectations.
