The most unsettling prospect in Clayface is that Matt Hagen could get exactly the face he asks for. Matt is an actor whose ascent is interrupted by a violent disfigurement. When an experimental treatment offers to restore his appearance, the word restore comes with a great deal of baggage. He wants a face he recognizes, but he also wants the version of it that people hired and photographed and expected to see. James Watkins’s film gives those wants a dangerous proximity. A successful treatment can return him to work while making it considerably harder for him to think of his body as his own.
Tom Rhys Harries has to make the early Matt credible as a man already good at adjusting his presentation. There is a genuine loss in seeing that ability become literal. An actor changing what an expression means still has a face to work against. Clayface takes away that resistance. The new material is horrifying in part because it can cooperate with him too readily. An expression produced by effort has a history and leaves evidence of the effort. Matt’s changing face invites the possibility that the next person to look at him will encounter only a decision about what they ought to see.
Watkins has an advantage in approaching Gotham as a city with jobs and hierarchies. A performer who becomes a liability discovers who can afford to stop returning calls. The studio’s expectations and the promises of the people around the treatment are useful sources of pressure because they operate before the film has to ask for a response to the monster. The screen career could bear still more weight in the middle of the story. The people who praised Matt’s appearance when it was useful to them are a more disturbing constituency than a generalized audience afraid of someone it no longer recognizes.
Naomi Ackie’s Caitlyn Corr gives the treatment a human point of contact. Much of its interest lies in the time when she can speak of a set of medical possibilities and Matt can hear a promise about returning to the life he had. Both are looking at the same injury. Their incentives give them very different ideas of what would count as recovery. It is a promising relationship because an act of sympathy can make it harder to draw a line around the experiment. Watkins has room to let a frightening decision come from somebody being allowed to believe she has found a way to help.
The transformation is where the direction is most assured. A body changing shape calls for a sense of weight and duration. If the movement is too frictionless it can become an effect the eye registers without imagining what it would be like to endure. The film’s interest in the drag and instability of the material pays off. There is something intimate in the fear that one part of Matt’s face might stop performing before another. That physical idea holds the audience close to him even after his motives become harder to defend.
The work of making the shape unstable is also a question of how much the camera allows us to see. A face is small enough for an audience to inspect at once. Any movement the eye cannot place immediately becomes significant. Watkins can let the film linger on a bit of uncertainty that would have disappeared in a wider shot of a character being attacked. There is a strong idea here about the intimacy of an effect. Something terrible can happen to the person filling the screen while the movement remains too small for anybody next to him to have noticed yet.
The story is more uneven when it shifts the emphasis from the treatment to settling scores. Revenge offers him a clear set of errands at precisely the point where it would be interesting to see whether he can still tell what he wants. A recognizable villain story brings familiar pleasures with it. The movie’s best grotesquerie asks for a less dependable alignment with its lead. An act can briefly satisfy a desire Matt understands and reveal a much less familiar appetite underneath it. Harries can carry that uncertainty further than the plot generally lets him.
The film gains some independence from the comic books by making these encounters feel like things that have happened to a working actor in a particular city. The industry around him can be unreasonable without requiring a comic-book conspiracy to explain it. The source material gives the story permission to pursue its physical extreme. The most interesting use of that permission is a scene where the new ability makes an earlier compromise look worse. Matt already agreed to a great deal of scrutiny before he found out that he could change what was under inspection.
Clayface makes good use of the distance between an actor’s control of a performance and a star’s control of his image. Matt spends the movie trying to recover both with the same intervention. The results are more disturbing when Watkins gives us a chance to imagine that one might be recovered at the expense of the other. The franchise gives the film a name for the figure Matt will become. The body horror gives it a reason to stay interested in the man who will have to live inside it.
