As we were walking to the car after our viewing of Clayface last night, my viewing companions and I were discussing the movie, and I mentioned how much it reminded me of Sam Raimi’s Darkman. As I described the 1990 film—a scientist experimenting with generating synthetic skin for burn victims is brutalized and left for dead by some mobsters, then enacts his revenge by using his experimental discoveries to get close to his victims by disguising himself as other people—my companion said, “Oh, so it’s the exact same.” And yeah, kind of. Clayface doesn’t have the same dark sense of humor, the lead character’s descent into madness is neither as successful or excitingly depicted, and it’s also a distractingly ugly movie. Darkman doesn’t have a poorly considered element of the protagonist being falsely accused of sexual assault, and the love interest in Clayface is the scientist this time around while the disfigured antivillain is an actor, but otherwise the changes are, if you’ll forgive the term, mostly cosmetic.
Matt Hagen (Thom Rhys Harries) is an actor on the rise, having come from humble beginnings in the Gotham City neighborhood known as The Narrows and risen to Hollywood stardom. On the day that he learns that he’s been nominated for an Oscar, he goes out clubbing with childhood friend Corey (Joshua James), who tries to warn him that he’s dancing with a mobster’s girlfriend. Matt ignores this and spends the night with the woman, only to wake up and get his face sliced to pieces by Markos Szabo (David Dencik)’s goons. Several costly and ineffective reconstruction surgeries later, not only has Szabo’s untouchable made man status and smear campaign (including having his moll claim that Matt drugged her) resulted in Gotham failing to prosecute criminally but also ensured Matt’s civil case is likewise dismissed. Bled dry by some bad investments on the part of his business manager Frank (Eddie Marsan), to whom Matt gave power of attorney, Matt crawls back to the roach-infested hole from which he thought he had escaped. Hope comes in the form of Dr. Caitlyn Corr (Naomi Ackie), whose research into nanotechnology may hold the key to fixing Matt’s facial scarring and help him get his life back. All the while, her fiancé John Borelli (Max Minghella), the one good cop in all of Gotham City, continues to investigate Matt’s disfigurement.
There are moments in Clayface that sing. The sequence near the end in which Matt manages to get inside of Szabo’s club and then proceeds to wipe the floor with his men because of his shapeshifting abilities is genuinely fun and exciting. It’s not a big CGI extravaganza where he overcomes with brute strength but is in a seemingly real environment full of actors and extras, and the shapeshifting cost-saving measure of having Matt transform as some object passes between him and the camera gives the whole thing a Twilight Zone flair that’s rather effective. This has been touted as a body horror film, and there’s enough of that to go around as well. The actual attack on Matt is harrowing, the goopification of his face is successful even when it’s computer generated, and the ways that he murders the recipients of his vengeance through various different applications of his newfound abilities is sufficiently gross and never gets boring. When prosthetics are in use, they’re also quite good; the scene of Matt having to cut through his own flesh during a bumpy plane ride to prevent his eyes from sealing shut has been in every preview, but it’s still effective in the final cut. It’s quite reminiscent of the Fringe episode “Ability,” which makes me wonder if screenwriter Mike Flanagan is as big a fan of that show as he is of Battlestar Galactica, as his recent casting of several BSG alums on Carrie demonstrated. There’s also a bizarre and erotically charged scene in which Caitlyn is studying Matt while he sleeps, only for him to partially morph into her and touch himself-as-her with his still-masculine hands. If nothing else, this one is at least a little “for the freaks.”
There are also moments that fall flat. The narrative choice to have Mia (Joana Ribeiro) accuse Matt of drugging and assaulting her is a strange one; the only excuse for it is that, once Matt’s face seems to have healed, he’s welcomed back onto the red carpet with nary a moment’s hesitation, which may have been intended as a commentary on how quick the media machine is to forgive men who are credibly accused (or convicted) of abuse. If that was the intent, it’s barely legible. The narrative journey of Matt’s supposed best friend Corey reads as an attempt at deepening the sense of betrayal that Matt feels when he realizes just how few people could actually rely upon and drive him further into an obsessive dependency upon Caitlyn to be friend, physician, confidante, and more. Unfortunately, the overall flat characterization of Corey and his glossed-over unlikely path to success in the wake of Matt’s fall means that everything having to do with this character feels forced and unnatural.
Having highlighted the good and the questionable, all that’s left to us is what doesn’t work, and there is, unfortunately, quite a bit of that. First and foremost, this is an ugly movie. I don’t want to keep comparing Clayface to Darkman, but there’s a quality to the grime and the gritty noir feeling in Raimi’s film that is not even attempted in James Watkins’s vision for Clayface. The interior sets range from decent (Matt’s awful Narrows apartment) to great (Szabo’s club), but every single outdoor shot looks like hot garbage. The presumably CGI backdrops look like something straight out of an early 2010s Syfy Channel show, and even if you try to ignore that your attention is constantly being drawn back to them by an overabundance of lens flare activity that makes JJ Abrams seem restrained. I rewatched the trailer for Darkman and although it has its fair share of special effect failure, you can tell that some thought and planning went into, for instance, the helicopter crash sequence. In night shots, Gotham City looks like Megalopolis, and it’s just awful. The romance here is also nothing to really write home about; Caitlyn’s fiancé is less a character and more of an afterthought. I did appreciate that the film had her be very resistant to Matt’s charms, but given where the narrative goes, it ends up having no real stakes.
I was not impressed with director Watkins’ Eden Lake, albeit for different reasons than my ultimately lukewarm feelings about Clayface, and I was subjected to the trailer for Speak No Evil for so many months that I refused to see it on principle. This is both a better and worse film than Eden Lake; that was an extended exercise in misery that was very much a product of its time: reactionary paranoia-mongering about dangerous youths as an excuse for extended misery with nothing substantive to say. This film is different; it’s at least trying to break out of the “low-budget movie about a B-list comic book villain” box by showcasing gross body horror and giving us no one to really root for. But the next time I feel a hankering for something like this, I’ll probably just watch Darkman instead.
-Mark “Boomer” Redmond
