Clayface is Absolutely Worth Your Time

To be completely honest, I kind of forgot that Clayface was even coming out until a friend of mine mentioned it to me. He thad thought that it was pretty good. After getting out and watching it myself, I would have to agree.

SPOILERS FOLLOW

The movie follows the corruption arc of actor Matt Hagen. After receiving an important award nomination, Matt returns to his hometown of Gotham to celebrate. In a club, he’s approached by Mia Torrez–the girlfriend of feared crime boss Markos Szabo. Despite being warned by his friend Corey, Matt spends the night with Mia. In the morning, Markos and his thugs cut Matt’s face up with a switchblade to teach him a lesson. Matt tries to use the legal system to pursue justice while also getting surgery for his face, but neither venture pans out, instead resulting in his financial advisor bleeding him dry. Left with nothing, Matt moves into a squalid apartment. While going through some of his magazines, he sees an article about a Dr. Caitlyn Corr. Dr. Corr was working on nanobots that could be used to repair the body, especially to combat neurodegenerative diseases, until her investors stole her ideas and moved on. Matt approaches Caitlyn and volunteers for human trials. She’s reluctant at first, but eventually agrees. The trials are slow, but Matt’s face is eventually healed. Elated, he decides to attend a red carpet premiere, but after an ugly confrontation with his former agent, his face begins to melt. In a panic, he runs back to Dr. Corr. She begins injecting him with a controlled dose, but when she steps away for a moment, Matt ups the dosage and absorbs all of the nanobots. His bodily seemingly returns to normal, and he even admits that he feels better than he ever has before. One day while playing basketball, he trips and bloodies his face. Matt walks away and watches in awe as his face, including his blood, heal themselves and return to his body. He tells Caitlyn, and they begin monitoring his condition. While on a flight, Matt gets agitated after seeing his old financial advisor standing by Szabo. In this state, his eyelids begin melting shut. He’s forced to handle this in the bathroom. Back in Gotham, he goes to Caitlyn and shows her what’s going on. She helps calm him down, then begins studying him. She notices that he’s beginning to unconsciously change his appearance. He eventually decides to confront his financial advisor, and accidentally kills him during the confrontation. Matt then goes to see his friend Corey, who has now gotten into acting, after the financial advisor claimed that Corey sold Matt out to Szabo. Corey denies the accusation until Matt sees that he’s filming a scene with Mia. Matt kills his friend, then impersonates him during the scene. Caitlyn’s fiancé, John, begins investigating the double homicide. He’s an honest cop, so when he sees Szabo there, he’s not afraid to mouth off to him, antagonizing the crime boss. Szabo orders his thugs to rough Caitlyn up, but Matt is able to intervene, sparking a bloody rampage through Szabo’s club that leaves the crime boss and everyone under him dead. John, who suspects that Matt is somehow involved, confronts him back at Matt’s apartment. The confrontation goes nowhere, and John leaves. When Caitlyn returns home, she has a conversation with Matt, who is pretending to be John because he’s become obsessively infatuated with her. She reveals that she believes Matt is behind the recent homicides. Caitlyn goes to gather some of the evidence and finds John’s dead body. Matt reveals himself, and Caitlyn uses John’s taser on him. The nanobots begin malfunctioning as Matt turns into a clay monster. Caitlyn activates the kill switch, shutting down the nanonbots and causing Matt’s body to disintegrate before flowing away into a sewer grate. The movie ends with a homeless man approaching Caitlyn for some change. He takes it back to his secluded room in the sewers, where he turns back into Matt Hagen. Caitlyn appears behind him and the two embrace. The camera pans out, revealing that Caitlyn is actually a clay construct. The two figures begin to melt together, becoming the deformed monster Clayface.

Clayface is marketed as a horror movie. I don’t really agree. There isn’t a whole lot of traditional horror in my opinion, and even the body horror aspect isn’t as unsettling as I was expecting it to be. I have a weird opinion of horror. On the one hand, I can enjoy creepy and unsettling media, especially when it involves monsters or the paranormal. However, I hate when horror is used as a vehicle to simply dismember people in disturbing ways. As a result, I was a little reticent about Clayface, especially because it is rated R. I can confidently say that Clayface wasn’t too much to handle. There were a few scenes that were hard to watch, maybe three total, but the worst of those was a surgery scene. One was the scene where Matt’s face gets cut up, which is understandably hard to watch. And the last scene is on the plane when Matt needs to use scissors to open his melting eyelids. It’s a very tense scene that always has you expecting the worse, especially because the plane is dealing with some turbulence, but the worst never actually happens. It’s a great scene because of the tension and suspense that it generates. It’s probably the best instance in the movie of generating this kind of tension, but as a whole it does a great job of keeping things tense and suspenseful.

Despite being a DC movie, Clayface feels disconnected enough from the overarching universe. It feels like a solid standalone piece. One potential concern I might’ve had was that the movie would end up like the Sony Venom trilogy. I have mixed opinions on the three movies. I think that are some things they do well, but I also think that there are some glaring flaws (i.e. Carnage’s entire character and personality). Clayface does not have that problem. Truth be told, I’m not as familiar with the original comic character, but it sounds like there are enough iterations of him that it doesn’t matter too much. My most concrete, and recent, exposure was seeing him in Batman: The Animated Series. Clayface from the movie is fairly similar to Clayface from the show, though the two still differ in key ways. The most important being that there’s no Batman appearing in the movie to save the day. Matt Hagen is the protagonist, but he is not a hero. The movie doesn’t shy away from having him do some messed up things. I do really appreciate that. The story is ultimately one about revenge and pride. When Matt was at the top of the world, he felt like no one could touch him until he lost everything. And once he did, he felt that his life was over and he had nothing left to lose. The movie is deeply tragic in that way as it traces the downfall and corruption of a young man. It’s made further tragic when you realize that there are two possible circumstances: he was set-up from the start by Szabo or he was simply a victim of chance and poor decisions. Throughout the movie, there are little hints that Szabo may have been targeting Matt from the start, from his girlfriend approaching and seducing Matt in the club to having Matt’s financial advisor on his payroll to having enough influence to get Corey into the film industry. However, there’s also the possibility that Matt was just in the wrong place at the wrong time, and he let himself get taken advantage of. I’m not sure which interpretation is more tragic, but I believe that each is equally valid.

I found the characterization, especially of Matt, to be quite excellent throughout the movie. From the beginning, you can tell that he’s driven by pride and, an admittedly misplaced, sense of justice. He’s warned that his actions might have consequences, but he doesn’t care. Then when the consequences come, he loses nearly everything. He tries to fight back and use the system, but in the end, he’s just used and abused until he has nothing left. It makes the rest of his actions in the movie understandable, albeit still wrong. It also does a great job of portraying Gotham as a deeply corrupt city where all of the different institutions are used incorrectly. My favorite tiny detail is when John, the only honest cop in the city, comments on his boss’ new watch, implying it or the money to buy it was a reward for helping Szabo. I appreciate when the movie trusts the audience enough to make connections like that. Turning to Szabo, he is awful and I spent the whole movie excitedly waiting for his downfall. His death is pretty brutal, and more than deserved. Watching Szabo and everyone around him who harmed Matt get ruthlessly torn apart by him is immensely satisfying, but there’s also an underlying horror, which is a nice juxtaposition with the commonplace romanticization of revenge in modern media. When watching the movie, I could actually pinpoint the exact moment that Matt lost control and crosses the line, becoming a monster. And its worth noting that just because he kills bad people, he isn’t rewarded. When John tells Caitlyn that Matt is a person of interest in these homicide cases, she’s reluctant to believe him until she sees the evidence and connects the dots. She’s horrified at his actions, even before she discovers that he killed John and has to activate the nanobot kill switch. Throughout the movie, Caitlyn is the grounding voice of reason. She wants to help Matt. His descent into obsession and infatuation with her and subsequent actions are meant to be disturbing, and it is very well done. Revenge is a horrifying thing. This movie shows that better than most.

The action in the movie is fantastic. One of the most interesting parts about Clayface as a character is the paranoia that he’s able to generate, and how creatively he can be used. The ability to freely change his appearance and become whoever he wants to is a valuable asset that he exploits throughout the final act of the movie. It also connects beautifully with some of his central character themes, including the question of who the real Matt Hagen actually is. But the distrust that he’s able to create leads to some fantastic moments towards the end, and the cinematic shot framing complements it perfectly. In some ways, Clayface is definitely a horror movie, but not for the conventional reasons. The horror of a good man succumbing to the depths of revenge, and then the violence he wreaks on others is deeply horrifying, just not in the traditional medium of dread and jump scares.

Another aspect of the movie that I appreciate is how its grounded in realism. Yes, there’s suspension of disbelief because it’s about a movie star using nanobots and becoming a shape-changing monsters, but it makes logical sense within its confines. I appreciate that his transformation powers have a reasonable explanation–the nanobots. It makes me think back to the TV show where Matt Hagen becomes Clayface after being doused in a chemical/product that allowed him to mold and change his face. The movie provides an arguably better and more grounded explanation as to what caused his physical changes.

I do have one nitpick about the movie. When Caitlyn leaves Matt’s apartment after a visit, he sees one of Szabo’s goons trailing her. At some point, Matt is able to get ahead of Sal (the henchman), so that when Sal grabs “Caitlyn” and threatens her, Matt reveals that it’s really him and kills the man. I don’t understand how Matt got between Caitlyn and Sal. If Sal were doing his job competently, which he presumably can otherwise Szabo wouldn’t trust him as a key enforcer, I fail to see how he could lose track of the real Caitlyn. I admit that it’s definitely a nitpick, but it’s really the only gripe I have with the movie as a whole.

SPOILERS END

Clayface is a great movie. It’s deeply tragic in how it portrays Matt Hagen’s downfall into the Batman foe. And it does a great job of being an origin story that doesn’t feature Batman. It was easier to watch than I was expecting it to be. Don’t get me wrong, there are some rough scenes that the squeamish may not enjoy, but it wasn’t over the top in the way that so many horror movies tend to be. I think that Clayface actually did something pretty interesting with the character and its thematic questions to the point that you can almost forget that it’s supposed to be grounded in comics. I would highly recommend giving the movie a watch.