Every Gotham villain gets introduced as a monster. The interesting ones turn out to be people first. Clayface, arriving in theaters on October 23 from Warner Bros. and DC Studios, is built entirely on that second idea, and the first reactions out of early screenings suggest the gamble worked. This is an origin story about an actor who loses the one thing his whole life depends on – his face – and about the desperate choice that follows.
Tom Rhys Harries stars as Matt Hagen, a working actor whose face is disfigured, and who turns to an experimental treatment that promises to give him his career back. Anyone who knows the comics knows that promise comes with a terrible price. What matters here is how the film treats Hagen before the transformation: not as a punchline or a freak show, but as a man watching his identity come apart. Harries has the hardest job in the picture, and by early accounts he carries it.
A creative team built for tragedy
Look at who made this film and the tone stops being a surprise. James Watkins directs, working from a screenplay by Mike Flanagan and Hossein Amini. Flanagan has spent years proving that horror hits hardest when it is really about grief and love, and Amini knows how to write people who want one thing so badly it ruins them. Add producers James Gunn and Matt Reeves – the two men currently shaping DC on screen from different ends – and you get a project with serious backing and a clear point of view.
Clayface is the third film in the new DC Universe, and it is rated R for bold body horror. Keep that in proportion. The craft here is the story: transformation effects built to make an audience feel Hagen’s loss, not just flinch at it. The supporting cast deepens the picture rather than decorating it – Naomi Ackie, David Dencik, Max Minghella, and Eddie Marsan, a group of actors who tend to make every scene they are in a little sharper.
Fans tracking the wider slate will enjoy comparing approaches, from the pure size of Godzilla x Kong: Supernova roaring toward 2027 to this film’s small, sad, human scale. Big franchises need both registers, and DC seems to know it.
What the first audiences said
The film screened for first reactions on October 14, and the response was strongly positive. Collider’s Steven Weintraub called the film fantastic and gave it a strong recommend – the kind of plain, unhedged praise critics save for films that genuinely land. Brandon Davis went with “freakishly awesome,” which is about as clear as a four-word review gets. Chris Killian praised the tragic backstory and pointed to the film’s gothic-romance feel, a description that fits the material beautifully. Clayface has always been, under the horror, a story about someone who wanted to be loved as he was.
That gothic thread is worth holding onto. Gotham works best as a place of shadows, old buildings, and older regrets, and a romance-tinged tragedy gives this film a flavor none of its franchise siblings have. Where other entries in the new DC Universe go wide, this one goes deep – one man, one ruined face, one terrible bargain.
Why this one deserves your ticket
There is a fair question to ask of any villain origin film: why should we spend two hours rooting for the bad guy? The answer this film seems to give is that Hagen did not start out bad at all. He started out vain, frightened, and human, and the treatment that remakes him is something plenty of people would at least consider in his position. That is uncomfortable, and it is also good drama. Harries reportedly plays both the hope and the horror without winking at the audience, which is exactly right.
It also helps that the season is full of returning favorites – audiences are already looking ahead to Shrek 5 bringing the swamp back for summer 2027 – and Clayface offers the opposite pleasure: something familiar in outline, strange and sorrowful in execution.
Clayface opens October 23, and it arrives with the strongest kind of momentum a film like this can have: people who have seen it, urging other people to see it. A tragic heart, a gifted cast, filmmakers who understand that horror and heartbreak are close cousins – that is a combination worth leaving the house for. Gotham has a new face. It is a sad one, and that is precisely why it works.
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