This Is Going To Hurt…
Thursday 22nd October 2026
Written by: Tom Wilson and Rashid AlKamraikhi
Tom’s Perspective
When we first meet famous Gotham actor Matt Hagen (Tom Rhys Harries), life is good. He’s the handsome star of a new movie, and they take a break on set to watch the nominations for best actor to be announced … and he’s made the cut! To celebrate, they hit the town, and while in a trendy nightclub he meets a beautiful woman, Mia (Joana Ribeiro), and ignores his best friend’s warnings that her boyfriend is a mob boss. This proves unwise, as he is attacked by thugs while lying in bed with her the next morning, and mob boss Markos Szabo (David Dencik) carves up his face with a switchblade. Hagen’s life quickly falls apart. Mia has falsely accused him of rape, and we watch as he loses his livelihood, his friends, his reputation and his money as the corrupt Gotham justice system sees Szabo go free, and he is forced to trade his beautiful apartment for a shoebox in skid row. Out of desperation, he makes contact with scientist Caitlyn Corr (Naomi Ackie), who is experimenting using nanobots on her own tissue (which she cuts off her forearm with a potato peeler). He convinces her to use him as a human trial, and early results prove successful, with his looks slowly returning. But it’s not happening fast enough, so he gives himself an overdose of nanobots … and hilarity does not ensue.
Tom Rhys Harries has clearly suffered for his art here, and he would have spent so much time in the Clayface makeup chair that it probably still has his arse-print in it as I write this. Watching a pampered actor get his face massaged in the opening scene foreshadows the horrors we see later, as his famous moneymaker starts to melt off him at the worst possible moments. The physical makeup effects are incredible, and the sheer amount of work is evident in the collection of polaroids that Caitlyn keeps to document Hagen’s transformation, as we realise that each polaroid represents hours in the makeup chair … and there’s about two dozen of them. Clayface leans into the body horror early, as we see surgeons trying in vain to rescue his mangled face, and there were gasps around the cinema as we watched his nose get reconstructed. We follow Hagen as he slowly learn to direct his shape-shifting abilities, but the more control he has over his appearance, the less he has over the darkness overcoming his soul. It’s only when he gets his looks back that we realise his ugliness has shifted internally.
Despite the fact that I saw this in a cinema behind someone dressed as Batman, Clayface has more in common with Joker than any superhero film. This is a character study of a man fighting a losing battle with his own darkness. Hagen is initially sympathetic – seeing him get overwhelmed with emotion when he sees he’s been nominated for an award, excusing himself so he can shed a tear and whisper to his late mother that “we did it”, is incredibly moving – but that depth of emotion quickly takes a turn for the worse. He doesn’t know how to feel feelings unless he’s playing a role. He can’t appreciate having his looks back because he is so consumed with revenge, and it’s not long before the audience runs out of sympathy for him. Like the culture war that clouded the release of Joker, Clayface might stir up some similar anger for using a false rape accusation as a plot point, given what is dominating US headlines at the moment, while a line like “the miracle of artificial intelligence” is said without a hint of hesitation. But Clayface is an incredibly well-staged film with some absolutely creepy scenes that will leave audiences squirming. I won’t soon forget the scene from the trailer of Hagen trying to cut open his eyelids in an aeroplane bathroom during turbulence.
A gruelling exercise in gothic body horror, anchored on an incredible performance from Tom Rhys Harries and some truly eye-popping visuals, Clayface is brutally violent and highly entertaining.
Rashid’s Perspective
Upfront, I really enjoyed this film. The acting is superb throughout, and while the violence is certainly graphic, it never feels like it is gratuitous or approaching “torture porn” territory. There were also enough sprinkles of humour laced throughout its runtime that you could almost label it a black comedy and, on that note, the humour used hits so well and intelligently that it puts it in another class than the cutting jibes and quips that are so overused in DC’s rivals’ cinematic universe. But it is ultimately a “comic book” movie, so there are going to be some contrivances that inherently come with it. Retconning Matt Hagen’s origin story from being a treasure hunter that fell into a radioactive pool to an actor that depends on their looks for a living was a smart move, and adds so much more depth to how the transformation affects his life, and the motives that drive him from being a good man to both figuratively and literally becoming a monster. Within this new setting though, falling into a radioactive puddle would have been too much of a narrative leap, so they plunge instead into another classic trope, science did it!
The nanobots that are injected into him by Caitlyn Corr are controlled by AI, but not once is the lens pointed back at the runaway AI as being the ‘true villain’ of the film. Sure, we are shown ostensively that they have a self destruct button, but at no point in the film while they are desperately trying to figure out what is happening to Matt, do they show any form of troubleshooting or attempts at refining the AI that guides them. No software patches, no firmware updates, they don’t even try turning them off and on again! Instead, it comes down to controlling emotions and human contact as the best way to mitigate the faults in the design. As someone who worked in IT for many years, this really bothered me, and felt like they left a whole storyline about the dangers of AI on the table. But I guess that’s not the story they wanted to tell.
Back to my first line, despite this, I still really enjoyed the film, and I’m hoping that we will see Tom Rhys Harries reprise the role in other DC films. He’s just too good in this to not use him again, and while they may have to soften the edges for him to appear in a Batman film compared to the gory portrayal we get in this one, isn’t that the beauty of clay? You can always mould it into something else.
Clayface is out everywhere today.