“Clayface” is a talky DC comic-book thriller about a hotshot actor named Matt Hagen (Tom Rhys Harries) who loses his good looks, then regains them along with the ability to mutate into anyone he pleases. The movie is also a shape-shifter. Directed by James Watkins from a script by Mike Flanagan (creator of the new “Carrie” reboot) and Hossein Amini, this wanly plotted body-horror adventure apes everything from “Terminator 2: Judgment Day” to David Cronenberg’s “The Fly” while having no personality of its own.
The film opens on Matt as the movie industry’s latest golden boy, sunlight caressing his tousled blond locks to literalize that he’s basking in the glow of success. On the morning of his first awards nomination, he ducks behind the set to hide a grateful tear. Born into poverty and raised in violence, he claims to have stuffed his negative emotions deep inside — perhaps too far, as we never see any convincing anger in him, just a nice young man going out of his way to charm flight attendants (a welcome change from recent celebrity headlines involving Selma Blair).
Acting, Matt says, is transforming one’s ugly emotions into something beautiful. That’s a lovely way to describe it, and “Clayface” does have decent ideas for those game to sift through the muck. But the film’s version of Hollywood (called Coast City) is as vicious as any back alley in Gotham, ruled over by agents who sneer, “This business is all surface.”
The decent first act sketches how fundamental Matt’s wide eyes and carved cheekbones are to his career. We see him splurge on face massages and ice baths more than we see him act. It’d be nice to know whether we’re rooting for a major talent or a disposable himbo, but our only glimpse of his craft is when he goes onto a talk show and improvises two lines from two separate roles, an English snit and an American thug. In that scene, Rhys Harries impressively alters his own features without makeup. Yet “Clayface” is merely an introduction, not an acting showcase. Whenever Rhys Harries’ Clayface transforms into a different person, another performer simply steps in.
The storytelling is mushy and slow. A well-connected gangster, Markos (David Dencik), and his girlfriend Mia (Joana Ribeiro, a zesty femme fatale), rob Matt of both his face and his reputation, a cancel-culture fall from grace that recalls the cautionary tales of Armie Hammer and Jonathan Majors without having anything to say about them. Here, Matt’s friends are bribed into blabbing about his past sins, although the script doesn’t bother to tell us what exactly he’s alleged to have done or whether it’s true. The distinction matters. “Clayface” wants to tell a sympathetic villain origin story like “Joker” or the TV miniseries “The Penguin.” Yet, it doesn’t trust the audience to handle moral complexity. Instead, it muddies the waters and pretends to be deep.
Desperate to reclaim his pretty privilege, Matt injects himself with a strain of skin-altering nanobots developed by a surgeon-slash-love interest, Dr. Caitlyn Corr (Naomi Ackie), who happens to be engaged to a homicide detective (Max Minghella). The pressure to stay handsome and famous turns Matt into a monster; it’s as though “The Substance” happened to “Thelma & Louise”-era Brad Pitt.
In his original incarnation, published in a 1940 issue of “Detective Comics,” Clayface was a bitter silent film actor who murders the creators of an ill-considered remake, a lesson the DC Universe can’t afford to learn. As written, this Clayface is kinda dumb. To prove that his body truly has become self-healing, he slices his finger, then slices his face, then slices his face again. How does it work? “The beauty of artificial intelligence,” Dr. Corr explains — a line that, in my theater, got at least one boo.
The practical special effects seem to be on the booer’s side, leaning on stagy but charming in-camera tricks that have gone out of style, like switching actors between close-ups. All the film’s creativity goes to corporeal gack. “Clayface” deserves to take a bow for at least a dozen moments of gross-out invention: Faces get pressed into backs, hands accidentally yank out spines, a jerk bites down on Matt’s flesh and chokes on it. If you never knew what the inside of a nose looked like, now you do.
Some of the movie’s most memorable moments have barely anything to do with the plot, like when Matt discovers his eyelids fusing together and attempts to separate them with nail scissors in the bathroom of a bumpy plane. Yet, the movie’s biggest set piece arrives with zero buildup. You don’t realize you’re watching the action climax until it’s halfway through. The sequence has some clever gags, but you’re distracted by the awareness of being narratively underwhelmed.
Watkins is a better director than this. His previous film, 2024’s “Speak No Evil,” was a malevolently funny skewering of polite manners and the modern manoverse. (Watch it if you haven’t.) He’s capable of getting great performances out of actors. Yet somehow he’s wound up making a science lab romance with no chemistry.
Rhys Harries and Ackie have one good scene together and he spends it asleep as she blushes to see how his body morphs when he’s dreaming about her. Once awake, Matt gazes at Dr. Corr in weepy admiration; she stares back at him neutrally. A love triangle only works when the girl in the middle cares passionately about both men. I’m reluctant to fault Ackie, who was dynamite earlier this summer in Boots Riley’s “I Love Boosters.” We pity this Clayface but we don’t care about him much either.
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