By Michael Marano

A brutally nasty Gotham revenge tale turns a minor Batman villain into the stuff of a major body-horror surprise.

Clayface, directed by James Watkins, screening at Alamo Drafthouse Seaport, AMC Boston Common, AMC Causeway, AMC South Bay, AMC Assembly Row, and Apple Cinemas Cambridge.

Tom Rhys Harries in scene from Clayface. Photo: Warner Bros

I went into Clayface expecting another bullshit exercise in franchise mismanagement from Warner Bros. The studio has churned out IP-driven crud like the unwatchable Black Adam and the box-office bomb Blue Beetle, while shelving movies people actually wanted to see—Batgirl and Coyote vs. Acme—for tax write-offs. Ketchup Entertainment seized on the fan outrage and rescued Coyote vs. Acme, which vindicated audiences over the Warner bean-counters: it turned a tidy profit and proved to be one of the year’s best movies.

Yeah, I said it.

Coyote vs. Acme, about Wile E. Coyote suing the heartless, evil, multinational Acme Corporation for grievous injury, is one of the best movies of the year, with a truly touching climax and a character-driven resolution that most mainstream dramas can’t touch. And the fact that the heartless, evil, multinational Warner Corporation tried to smother it in its crib—a metaphor too clumsy to work in fiction, but an actual situation in the corporate hellscape we currently live in—kinda makes my head hurt.

So why the hell should I trust Warners to make a decent movie about a minor Batman villain? I mean, I loved the Joker movies, and The Penguin miniseries was brilliant, but… Clayface?! A crook who shapeshifts because he’s made of the kind of stuff kindergarteners use to make sculptures? And even after I’d heard about Clayface coming down the pike, just about nobody else I knew had. No one I knew had seen a trailer or a poster. I had a feeling that this was a movie about a Batman villain that was really a sleazy grift to hold onto certain copyrights, like how Sony makes those atrocious Spider-Man villain movies without Spider-Man, like Morbius and Kraven, just to get a bigger cut of the Tom Holland Spider-Man movies.

I went into the press screening of Clayface just to watch the road accident that it most assuredly was destined to be.

Clayface is shockingly good.

Like… it’s a real movie, not just an exercise in shuffling assets, both intellectual and financial.

Facelessness is such a potent theme in movies. Who are you if you no longer have your face? Who do people see when they don’t see your face? Think of Hiroshi Teshigahara’s adaptation of Kobo Abe’s Face of Another. And Frankenheimer’s adaptation of David Ely’s Seconds. Karloff in The Raven. Conrad Veidt in The Man Who Laughs. Peter Lorre in The Face Behind the Mask. (Editor’s note: You left out Georges Franju’s brilliant Eyes Without a Face.)

Clayface takes that theme and plugs it into a gangster/revenge plot, along the lines of Road to Perdition, Miller’s Crossing, Get Carter, and The Outfit. Maybe more than anything, Clayface, as a science-fictional take on gangster-focused revenge, is a riff on Sam Raimi’s Darkman.

If you’ve noticed I’m comparing Clayface to a ton of other movies, that’s because the movie shapeshifts right along with its antihero, never losing its own deeply messed-up sense of self. The glue holding it all together? Imagine David Cronenberg directing The Godfather, Part II.

Pretty-boy actor Tom Rhys Harries plays pretty-boy actor Matt Hagen, a kid from the rough side of Gotham making it big out West. A run-in with the local mob leaves Hagen’s mug looking like strips of uncooked bacon hanging off his skull. And that’s just the start: betrayals pile up, leaving him ruined, wrecked, and holed up in a roach-infested hovel. Then he hears about an experimental nanotech treatment developed by Dr. Caitlyn Corr (Naomi Ackie) and turns to her for help.

And hey … guess what? Things go terribly, terribly wrong, in the finest late-night creature-feature tradition. Only here, the lab sits in the monstrously messed-up urban hellscape of Batman’s Gotham.

A profoundly delicious nastiness seeps into every corner of Clayface. This poor schmuck who’s lost his face has to watch the masks slip off everyone around him, even as he loses control of the one concealing his own dark, Mr. Hyde-ish tendencies. Hagen shapeshifts, yeah. But more than changing his shape, he’s losing it—physically and mentally. The forms he takes mirror the cruelty of the Gotham around him, and that’s a goddamn tragedy.

A real shout-out goes to the creative team. Mike Flanagan, who’s behind Amazon’s current Carrie series, wrote the screenplay with Hossein Amini, the Oscar-nominated screenwriter of Drive, riffing on a two-part Clayface story from Batman: The Animated Series. The Woman in Black director James Watkins orchestrates the nastiness beautifully, delivering some showstopper set pieces—including, believe it or not, a minute-long mini-musical number that would do Bollywood proud. These guys got the assignment.

You don’t need to be steeped in Batman lore. There’s no mention of Batman, and despite scenes set in Gotham Police HQ, there’s no mention of Commissioner Gordon.. Clayface feels like a comic book movie without the multibajillion-dollar excesses that define so many of them. It has a B-movie, drive-in vibe: it doesn’t so much depict antisocial acts (though there are plenty) as feel like an antisocial act in its own right.

My worries about Clayface were unfounded. This is not IP management. It feels too unruly to be managed, too sincere in its brutality. And that makes it an insanely fun, deliciously icky night at the movies.

P.S. There’s no post-credits scene. When it’s over, you can leave. You won’t miss a thing.

Author, critic, writing instructor, and personal trainer Michael Marano, as a lifelong comic book fan, truly hopes that Warners will make a Ragman movie next.