How should one go about making yet another instalment in a middlingly successful cinematic universe that doubles as an origin story for one of Batman’s more ludicrous mid-tier villains? The makers of Clayface have come up with what we can only hope will be a popular strategy going forward: by treating their film as if it is neither of those things.
Director James Watkins, of Eden Lake and The Woman in Black, has crafted a stylish and stomach-twisting, contemporary, urban, body horror inspired by vintage material that just so happens to be a DC superhero title. There is no pandering to fans, nor gestures towards grander unfolding narratives. Or if there are, I missed them. Instead, Watkins and his writers, Mike Flanagan (of numerous Stephen King adaptations) and Hossein Amini (Drive, The Two Faces of January), simply get on with the task at hand, which is moulding their own gripping and often uproariously horrid pulp cautionary tale.
The pretty-in-a-menacing-way Tom Rhys Harries is astutely cast as Matt Hagen, a rising Hollywood star whose dreamy countenance is carved up by gangsters. Thanks to an experimental AI-driven treatment developed by Naomi Ackie’s compassionate rogue geneticist, he finds himself transformed into a shape-shifting golem. In a piece of drily funny early foreshadowing, a make-up artist gives Matt a vigorous facial massage: get a load of this guy’s pliable mug even before the nanobots get hold of it.
Almost as soon as the therapy kicks in, Matt uses his newfound powers to exact vengeance on the mobsters who wronged him, including Eddie Marsan’s dirty accountant – whose own face, in a Lynchian bedroom scene, delivers the most surreal jump scare of the year.
Watkins’s direction is so crisp and Flanagan and Amini’s script so precise that even during Matt’s quickfire shape-shifting rampages, you always know where and who he is, unless the building of suspense demands otherwise. The level of gore is also surprisingly high – more David Cronenberg than superhero – and it is variously ladled on and teasingly withheld with a sadistic flourish. A scene involving a pair of nail scissors, a suddenly glued-together eyelid and occasional jolts of in-flight turbulence is one to watch through meshed fingers.
It cannot be overstated how much fun it is to soak up a film like this on what feels like its creators’ largely unhindered terms. Aside from the occasional reference to Gotham City, in fact, you could feasibly leave a screening of Clayface with no idea you’d been watching a franchise movie. At this painfully risk-averse moment for the major studios, that may be the best we can hope for.
In UK cinemas from October 23