Tom Rhys Harries breaks out as a disfigured movie star turned shape-shifter in James Watkins’ gnarly, R-rated Batman villain origin story.
For three trailers, DC Studios refused to show us what Matt Hagen becomes, and we argued that was the whole strategy. Now that the movie is here, the restraint makes sense. Clayface is not really a superhero movie at all. It is a body-horror film about vanity, revenge and a face that will not stay put, and it is the most confident thing DC has made in years.
The character goes back to the earliest days of Batman. The first Clayface, in the 1940s, was a bitter actor who hid behind a mask to kill. This film draws on the version the comics introduced decades later, Matt Hagen, and keeps the most important part of the original: he is a performer first. That choice gives the movie its spine. Clayface is a story about a man whose entire identity is his face, and what happens when someone takes it from him.
Tom Rhys Harries plays Matt as a Gotham-born actor coming off an Oscar nomination, home for a few days before his next shoot and enjoying every second of the attention. One night out ends with a gangster’s girlfriend in his bed and the gangster, a coolly menacing David Dencik as crime boss Markos, standing over him with a switchblade.
By morning, Matt’s face is ruined, and so is his career. The film does not look away from the damage. The early scenes of Matt trying to live with his new face, hiding under a mask on Gotham’s streets and catching the reactions of strangers, are some of the most painful in the movie, and they set up everything that follows.
The courts are bought and the police are worse, so Matt turns to Dr. Caitlyn Corr (Naomi Ackie), a scientist whose research was stolen by the investors who funded it. Her nanocell treatment works, at first, and even leaves him impervious to wounds. Matt is soon back on a red carpet announcing his comeback. Then his face starts to slide whenever his emotions run high, he takes a dose far larger than she ever intended, and he discovers he can become anyone he wants.
Revenge comes next, starting with a slimy business manager (Eddie Marsan, perfectly cast) and a best friend (Joshua James) who would not testify for him.
Harries is the find of the year in a comic book movie. Mostly known for supporting work in films like Kandahar, he has to play a man the audience should be repulsed by and somehow keeps us on his side. He is funny about Matt’s narcissism and devastating about his fear, and he makes the shape-shifting feel like a performance within a performance: an actor finally getting to play every role in the room. There is a dark joke buried in the premise, that the only thing worse than losing your face is getting to choose a new one every day, and Harries plays both sides of it.
When Matt is vain, he is a little ridiculous. When Matt is scared, he is heartbreaking. When Matt is angry, he is genuinely frightening.
Ackie gives the film its heart as a brilliant woman who has been cheated once and knows exactly what she is risking by helping him. The growing closeness between doctor and patient could have been a cliche, but Ackie plays Caitlyn as someone who sees Matt as both a person and the proof that her life’s work was real, and the tension between those two things drives the second act.
Max Minghella is quietly excellent as her fiance, John, one of the only honest cops in Gotham, who is investigating the bodies piling up around her patient. He keeps an indulgent but wary eye on the two of them, and the triangle that forms is more adult than anything in a typical comic book movie.
James Watkins, who made Eden Lake and the recent Speak No Evil remake, is a horror director first, and it shows. He leans on practical effects wherever he can, and the makeup work is genuinely upsetting in the best way, from the first cut to the reconstruction surgery.
One sequence aboard a plane, with Matt locked in a lavatory during turbulence trying to cut away skin that is growing over his eyes, is the most tense scene I have watched in a studio movie this year. It is gross, it is claustrophobic, and it is staged with the precision of a heist. The climax, a nightclub massacre in which Matt shifts from one face to the next, lets half the supporting cast briefly play the monster and is staged with real wit.
The script, by Mike Flanagan and Hossein Amini, keeps the pulp dialogue of a comic but gives Matt a genuine arc, and the influences are worn proudly.
There is a lot of David Cronenberg here, a bit of Sam Raimi’s Darkman, more than a little The Fly in the way the film treats transformation as tragedy, and a clear debt to Georges Franju’s Eyes Without a Face, the 1960 French classic about a surgeon trying to restore a ruined face.
It is not subtle, and the Gotham setting can feel like an afterthought, but it never pretends to be anything other than what it is. At 108 minutes, it also knows when to stop, which is more than most comic book movies can say.
What the film does not do is lean on its universe. There is no Batman, no cameo designed to set up the next movie and no end-credits promise of a team-up. That restraint is the boldest choice in the whole production.
DC has spent a decade trying to build a cinematic universe, and its best movie in years is the one that mostly ignores it. Gotham here is a grimy, crooked city of nightclubs and bought judges, closer to a 1970s crime movie than to a superhero backlot.
That is the real lesson for DC. Clayface is a modestly budgeted, R-rated, standalone horror movie opening the week before Halloween, and it does not need a franchise to justify it.
It competes this weekend with prestige releases like Taika Waititi’s Klara and the Sun, and it is the one I would tell a crowd to go see. If audiences show up for it, it could change how the studio thinks about its villains, and how much of the comics it is willing to treat as genre material rather than franchise filler.
RATING: ★★★★☆
That’s a Wrap | Clayface
A gnarly, confident body-horror thriller with a breakout turn from Tom Rhys Harries, Clayface proves DC’s villains can carry a movie without a hero in sight.
Watch The Clayface Trailer Below:
CREDITS
Director: James Watkins
Screenwriters: Mike Flanagan, Hossein Amini
Cast: Tom Rhys Harries, Naomi Ackie, David Dencik, Max Minghella, Eddie Marsan, Nancy Carroll, Joshua James
Distributor: Warner Bros. Pictures, DC Studios
Runtime: 1 hour 48 minutes
Rating: R
Release Date: In theaters October 23, 2026
