CLAYFACE (2026)

Hunky actor Matt Hagen (Tom Rhys Harries) has crawled out of Gotham’s most deprived district to become a film star alongside his best friend, Cory Bowers (Joshua James). But a night on the town ends in tragedy when Hagen lets himself be seduced by a gangster’s moll, Mia Torrez (Joana Ribeiro). The next morning, her lover, Markos Szabo (David Dencik), and his goons disfigure him. Hagen’s fall from fame and fortune is precipitous. Then he meets Dr Caitlyn Corr (Naomi Ackie), a brilliant scientist with a serum that restores cellular structures, as if remoulding wet clay…

I found Clayface underwhelming. After a point, I struggled to care about Hagen’s plight—specifically, when he kills an old friend whose crime seems to be telling the gangsters threatening them and their family where to find their former classmates. The gangsters could easily have got that information anyway, given that their target was a celebrity. This is the same friend who had tried to warn Hagen against his folly in the first place.

The story might work if Hagen, or Clayface, were an antihero. The film hints at that possibility, but it isn’t really that kind of story: Hagen is ultimately meant to be tragic and relatable. The characterisation isn’t strong enough to support this, however, and the film is short on plot and ideas. Its visuals work, and with a visionary such as David Cronenberg at the helm, the film could have taken off. As it is, it’s mildly engaging.

The gore is the film’s strongest feature. A nightclub scene near the end threatens to be great but never quite achieves lift-off. In the hands of a visionary—or with a team freed from the comic-book studio’s presumably constant, suffocating directives—the body-horror sequences could have been part of a genuinely troubling, thought-provoking narrative, with genuinely grey morals and more emotional and intellectual depth than a fanboy’s perspective.

Director James Watkins and his writers, Mike Flanagan and Hossein Amini, are capable of making great horror entertainment. The fact that this film got made at all is a testament to them. Comic-book studios rarely let 18-rated horror films with even a little spark get past the starting gate before the men in suits chase them down and beat them into mediocrity. Still, there was never much doubt about who’d win that fight. The film hints at a more interesting story in places, such as when Hagen morphs into a woman and briefly appears in cross-dress.

A character like Clayface could offer a way to explore the elusive boundaries of personal and gender identity. As Cronenberg’s films once did, it could show how technology intersects with human development to create new bodies, behaviours and ways of being. But can you imagine a big-budget comic-book film—with an established character and a ravenous mainstream fanbase—being able, or even wanting, to deal with such themes in anything more than a superficial way?

The acting is good. Watkins’s British perspective is reflected in the number of character actors from UK television and film who appear in a big US production like this. Most notably, Rob Brydon—the Welsh actor and comedian who hosts the panel show Would I Lie to You? and co-starred in Gavin and Stacey (2007-2024)—plays a supercilious talk-show host. In one scene, Hagen uses his persona to address an aspect of himself. Eddie Marsan, a veteran of British crime films such as The Gentlemen (2019) and Operation Fortune: Ruse de Guerre (2023), plays a smarmy lawyer.

Harries is Welsh, but his accent and hunky good looks make him convincingly New York—or Gotham—as if he’s just stepped out of an underwear-modelling contract that helped plaster his face across Times Square. British actor Joshua James also does a good job, though he looks more like a Brit abroad. In fact, he looks as if he’s escaped from The Inbetweeners (2008-2010). Looking at the cast list, I see that most of the actors are British, from Naomi Ackie to Max Minghella, who plays her police-officer boyfriend. Swedish-Danish actor David Dencik adds some European colour as the main antagonist.

The gangster antagonists are fairly standard, though they’re styled distinctly enough to tell apart. In the final confrontation, they seem like a kind of found family, caring for one another a little more than mere goons and co-conspirators would. But there isn’t much to it. I suppose the story, as told here, might work better as a comic book, where the focus can be on the art style and the artist’s voice can come through in images made with paint and ink. A film, I think, needs more insight into its characters, stronger dialogue and a clearer sense of who they are.

Alternatively, it could aim for camp, using extreme stylisation to capture the tone of its source material, as some comic-book films do Clayface falls somewhere between these approaches, aiming for seriousness but occasionally letting a little camp peek through. I wish it had leaned into that more. It could still have been an 18-rated horror film with some humour in the mix. Still, mustn’t grumble. The gore is good and inventive, and although the story felt flat to me, I liked the ending: tragic and a little mind-bending.

UK • USA | 2026 | 108 MINUTES | 2.76:1 | COLOUR | ENGLISH

Cast & Crew

director: James Watkins.
writers: Mike Flanagan & Hossein Amini (story by Mike Flanagan; based on characters from ‘DC’).
starring: Tom Rhys Harries, Naomi Ackie, David Dencik, Max Minghella & Eddie Marsan.