Clayface

GoMovieReviews Rating: ★★★1/2

Rated: MA15+

Directed by: James Watkins

Screenplay Written by: Mike Flanagan and Hossein Amini

Story by: Mike Flanagan

Based on Characters from DC

Produced by: Matt Reeves, Lynn Harris, James Gunn and Peter Safran

Starring: Tom Rhys Harries, Naomi Ackie, David Dencik, Max Minghella, Eddie Marsan, Nancy Carroll and Joshua James.

‘There’s so many of you, it must be hard to find the real you.’

It’s a sunny day in Hollywood.  And Matt Hagen (Tom Rhys Harries) is living his life in the sun, on the rise.

He’s just been nominated for Best Actor.

He’s living his best life alongside his best mate Corey (Joshua James).

Until he sleeps with the wrong girl, Mia (Joana Ribeiro). And her gangster boyfriend ruins his face.

Down and out, Matt loses everything. He has nothing to lose, so he’s happy to sign his life away for one more chance.  To get his face back. To get his life back.

The only catch is there’s unknown side-effects.

It’s a treatment for neurodegenerative disorders; a treatment that changes cells at their core, not facial scaring and disfigurement.

Matt doesn’t care.  He tells, begs, Caitlyn Corr (Naomi Ackie), the scientist struggling to bring her experimental product to market, to treat him.  She takes pity.  She wants to help. She wants her AI out there doing good.  With devastating consequences.

‘What happens if something goes wrong with the AI?’  Matt asks.

‘We hit the kill switch.’

What could go wrong?

At its heart, Clayface is a revenge film.  Matt has been wronged.  Kicked while he’s down.

There’s no thrill killing here (killing yes, and sometimes amusing shapeshifting) – more an emerging monster, driven by an anger that becomes visceral in its birth.

There’s body horror and medical procedure close-ups of needles into scar tissue, scalpel peeling off skin moments that had the whole audience in the cinema bracing as we collectively cringed at the blood.  Or the potential for blood.

It’s hairy gore.  And up-close oozing eyes that make Clayface a sometimes-squeamish watch that’s offset by the beauty of Tom Rhys Harries as the actor Matt, and the heart-felt doctor Naomi and their complicated relationship, including Naomi’s fiancé, Detective John Borrelli (Max Minghella).

I’m more a horror-thriller fan than a DC aficionado, so I didn’t find the squeamish bits too confronting.  I was more interested in the emergence of the monster and the change of Matt into the many; of the play of his ability as an actor folding into the monster’s ability to shape change into anything.

Not overly thrilling, more a character study of the origin story of the Gotham DC character: Clayface.