Clayface Keeps Batman Offscreen and Puts Horror First

Clayface opened in theaters on October 23 with Batman absent from the story of one of his own villains. James Watkins’s film follows Matt Hagen, played by Tom Rhys Harries, from a promising acting career through disfigurement and an experimental attempt to restore his face. Some viewers already want Hagen to fight the Dark Knight in a sequel. Their wish makes sense: a Clayface who can change his shape seems born to give the world’s most suspicious detective a difficult evening. But the first film has a question of its own. What happens to an actor’s sense of self when his face stops obeying him?

That question gives the Batman-free film its shape. Hagen’s transformation carries the action, the horror and the character study. A Batman appearance would give audiences a familiar adversary through whom to judge him; without one, Hagen’s choices have to hold the screen themselves. The bargain also exposes a weakness. If Gotham exists chiefly to injure Hagen and send him on his way, the city can begin to look like interchangeable crime-thriller scenery. The film’s strongest opportunity and its sharpest criticism grow from the same decision to keep the camera close to Matt.

The Clay Was Shaped Before This Film

Clayface has never had a single, tidy origin waiting to be photographed. The character’s comic-book history includes Basil Karlo and Matt Hagen, and Batman: The Animated Series drew elements from both for its version of Hagen. Its two-part “Feat of Clay” story introduced that version in September 1992. The actor’s damaged face and his attempt to recover it became the foundation for a shapeshifter whose tragedy had as much to do with dependence and desperation as with spectacular powers.

The new film retains the actor, the facial injury and the transformation. Its emphasis changes. The animated story placed more weight on Hagen’s humanity, while Watkins’s feature drives toward revenge and the frightening possibilities of an unstable body. An animated television two-parter and a feature-length horror film have different room to maneuver, so this is a comparison of what each foregrounds, rather than a contest with a points table. Both ask an actor to confront the loss of the face by which others know him. The film makes that confrontation harder to separate from what he does to other people.

This history also offers a more useful measure of fidelity than counting appearances by Batman. The film inherits a central Clayface problem: performance has become inseparable from survival. Hagen used to choose when to become someone else for work. After his injury, recovering the ability to present a face becomes an urgent need. His powers then turn the old professional skill into a bodily condition. A costume might come off at the end of a scene. Matt’s new face may have no such curtain call.

A Face, a Career and a City

Watkins’s film begins with Hagen as a successful actor from Gotham’s Narrows. Crime boss Markos Szabo disfigures him; Gotham’s police and prosecutors decline to bring charges, and Hagen loses a civil suit. Reconstructive surgery and legal costs leave him destitute. Caitlyn Corr’s experimental nanocells repair his face, but emotional distress makes it start to melt. The mechanism belongs to comic-book science. The predicament is painfully legible: the thing that might restore his livelihood also makes control over his appearance precarious.

Watkins connected the film’s body horror to fears of losing identity and livelihood and of one’s body going wrong, telling Page Six in remarks reproduced by The A.V. Club. His explanation helps account for the camera’s interest in Hagen’s transformation. It does not settle how sympathetically the finished film treats the violence that follows. An injury explains why Matt seeks a remedy; it cannot settle what he is entitled to do once he has one. The revenge story keeps asking how long an audience will remain on his side as his power expands.

Gotham contributes more than a postcode to that predicament. Its police and prosecutors leave Hagen without a criminal case against the man who disfigured him. That failure helps push him toward an unapproved treatment and, eventually, revenge. Yet a sequence of institutions failing one man can still leave a city thinly drawn. Viewers may understand the chain of harm while wanting to know more about the place that made it possible. Keeping Batman away gives Hagen room; it also removes the figure most closely associated with investigating Gotham’s rot.

The resulting disagreement among critics has a concrete point of contact. The film was faulted for failing to use Gotham as a character, while it was welcomed as a horror film that could almost be watched without recognizing a franchise entry. One criticism asks the location to exert pressure beyond the plot. The other prizes the freedom to let a DC film stand apart from a larger narrative. They can both identify features of the same movie. Gotham can function in Matt’s origin without acquiring the density that some viewers expect from a Batman story.

There is a further risk inside the close focus. Hagen’s injuries and the pleasure of watching an ingenious shapeshifter pursue revenge pull in different directions. The film can invite sympathy for a ruined actor while offering the visual thrill of his attacks. If the second pleasure overwhelms the first, the identity story thins out; if the film treats every act of violence as an inevitable consequence of his suffering, Matt loses agency. The question for viewers is how much of the man remains visible as the effects become more elaborate.

What Would Batman Bring?

Some fans have called for a Batman confrontation in a possible sequel, a glimpse of online enthusiasm rather than a measure of what audiences as a whole want. DC Studios had announced no sequel plan as of October 23. A hypothetical encounter nevertheless gives the first film a revealing test. Batman would have to identify a man who can alter his appearance, and Matt would face someone trained to distrust appearances. The matchup could extend the film’s interest in performance and identity into a detective story.

It could also change whose fear organizes the scene. In Clayface, the unsettling prospect is Matt’s inability to rely on his own face, followed by the harm he can do with that instability. Set him against Batman and the immediate puzzle becomes whether the detective can recognize, catch or contain him. That might be thrilling. It might also reduce a damaged actor to an especially versatile obstacle. Neither outcome follows automatically from putting a cowl in the frame; the writing would have to make room for the person inside the clay.

The animated Hagen offers one route through that difficulty. Its greater attention to his humanity shows how a Batman story can make the villain’s predicament part of its appeal. Watkins’s film tests another route, letting bodily change and revenge dominate before a superhero arrives to impose order. A future meeting could bring those approaches into conversation, provided Batman comes to investigate the man and the city that failed him. Otherwise the actor who can become anyone may end up playing the one role Gotham already has ready for him: the next villain in line.