Summary
DC steps away from the heroes and explores the monsters with a delightfully dark streak of body horror in Gotham.
While the DC Universe may still be at the starting block in its attempt to build a Marvel-style cinema empire, with Clayface they may have just found their superpower. Not being wholesale tied to an ongoing saga, director James Watkins and screenwriters Mike Flanagan and Hossein Amini keep the stakes low while piling the body horror high, creating something truly unique in the DCU.
The original Clayface was created by Bill Finger and Bob Kane for a 1940 issue of Detective Comics, but Flanagan and Amini seem to have combined their Clayface with the later Matt Hagen version, created by Finger and artist Sheldon Moldoff in the 1960s. Like those earlier comics, their version of Hagen (Tom Rhys Harries) is an actor on the verge of critical and commercial superstardom.
Yet when Hagen sleeps with the wife of a mob boss, he is disfigured, discredited and left in poverty. Out of desperation, he turns to Dr Caitlyn Corr (Naomi Ackie), a scientist experimenting with nanotechnology that might restore his face – but could also have some unexpected side-effects.
After the character-crammed Superman and the intergalactic Supergirl, Watkins keeps us decidedly grounded in Clayface, refreshingly centred on lower stakes. Quite literally: our introduction to the DCU’s Gotham is a street-level view, concentrating not on historic Wayne Manor or the rooftops, but on how people live in the Narrows. Shot in Liverpool, UK, there’s a different feel, an older one, that Christopher Nolan’s Chicago or Tim Burton’s expressionist Art Deco sets never quite captured.
It’s not just the city, either. Whether it’s the flash of a nipple in a nightclub or Hagen’s face being cut open (for the first of many times), this DCU is not for younger audiences. (It’s received an R rating in the US and is restricted to people over 15 here in Australia.) Flanagan and Amini initially make this the story of a person literally rebuilding themselves, then turn it into a revenge story. Under heavy prosthetics, Hagen is often at war with his own body. At other times, he’s finding creative ways to undo the bodies of others.
Harries offers a star turn here, achieving the delicate balance of pathos, sympathetic anti-hero and shapeshifter. His challenge is that much of the time, he’s “wearing” someone else’s face. In other words, almost everyone in the cast gets a crack at playing a version of Hagen. Rounding out the ensemble are familiar faces like Eddie Marsan as a crooked agent and Max Minghella as a Gotham cop engaged to Ackie’s Dr Corr, each of whom get their chance at duality.
The best DC Comics films are the standalone ones, and while Clayface is officially part of the DCU’s first chapter (dubbed ‘Gods and Monsters’), its biggest achievement is in defying the expectations of the studio label. Genuinely frightening at times, it rips along at a pace when needed and slows down to explore the characters as well. Either way, it’s impossible to look away. If this is the direction of the DCU, things are looking delightfully dark.
2026 | USA | DIRECTOR: James Watkins | WRITERS: Mike Flanagan and Hossein Amini | CAST: Tom Rhys Harries, Naomi Ackie, David Dencik, Max Minghella, Eddie Marsan, Rob Brydon | DISTRIBUTOR: Warner Bros. | RUNNING TIME: 108 minutes | RELEASE DATE: 22 October 2026 (Australia), 23 October 2026 (USA)