Clayface, an origin story between body horror and revenge movie

The face is the means through which we connect to the outside world, the filter through which others recognize our identity, with dominant aesthetic canons dictating mainstream logic. It's normal that when an actor loses their external security, the situation can only degenerate. From this premise, Clayface, a new DC comic book movie, takes its cue from a popular villain belonging to the narrative universe of Batman.

Written by modern horror guru Mike Flanagan along with Hossein Amini - with the former, after delivering his screenplay, declaring that he now considers the film a work of director James Watkins - the film is yet another project of the new course desired by James Gunn and potentially one of the riskiest. We are, in fact, facing a borderline operation, not suitable for the most impressionable viewers due to those body horror dynamics that progressively take over in an already dramatically more unsettling narrative than average.

The Face of Horror

The story stars Matt Hagen, a young actor whose career is on the rise, with an Oscar nomination to boot. Too bad that, during a night at a club, an ill-advised flirt with the partner of the cruel boss Markos Szabo costs him everything: the man's reaction is brutal, and Matt is monstrously disfigured. Now no studio wants to work with him anymore, and even the public seems to turn their backs on him, horrified by his new and tragic appearance.

Lacking concrete alternatives and unable to accept those features he no longer feels are his own, Matt decides to turn to Dr. Caitlyn Corr, a scientist who is working on experimental cellular technology, designed to combat certain degenerative diseases and potentially capable of regenerating damaged tissues. The cure initially seems to work, restoring Matt's pleasing face he had before the violence. Soon, however, frightening side effects begin to manifest, constantly altering his appearance. As he learns to control his body, Matt's mind takes a point of no return, and the desire for revenge consumes him day after day.

To Be or Not to Be

We are faced with a film that attempts to combine the tragic dimension of the character with the rawest and most spectacular component of body horror, now definitively mainstreamed even among the general public after the success of The Substance (2024). It's no coincidence that many have called it a visionary cross between two cults such as Darkman (1990) and The Fly (1986), in the Cronenbergian version, even if it lacks the irony of the first and the poignant melodramatic soul of the second.

Clayface remains in any case a title full of personality, in which Watkins - author of the decent remake of Speak No Evil (2024), but above all of the remarkable Eden Lake (2008) - has no intention of giving up the suggestions of genre cinema, enhancing its more physical and repulsive impact, with cuts, incisions, and bodily mutations that in some passages can upset weaker stomachs. After all, we are dealing with a man seeking revenge, who is not even an anti-hero in the strict sense: the story takes on increasingly darker and more desperate tones, transforming the protagonist into a villain in every respect, although his journey is at least partly understandable in light of a psychological condition that is now severely compromised.

Behind the protagonist's continuous transformations, who ends up becoming a kind of shapeshifter, capable of assuming the appearance of others with disarming ease, lies a reflection on the value attributed to external appearance and the need to be accepted by a society in which those who do not fit into certain canons risk being cut off from the entertainment world. An interesting intuition, which also targets the Hollywood environment, where appearances often matter more than substance, but which does not always find a script adequate to the complexity of the themes addressed, thus, paradoxically, only superficially explored.