Clayface first reviews: 'freakishly awesome', 'shockingly gruesome' — and you need zero DC homework to enjoy it
The people who have seen Clayface keep reaching for the same two movies to describe it, and neither of them is about Batman.
Clayface is the third film in James Gunn and Peter Safran's new DC Universe, and the first one built as a straight horror movie. James Watkins, who made Eden Lake and the 2024 Speak No Evil, directed it from a script by Mike Flanagan and Hossein Amini. Tom Rhys Harries plays Matt Hagen, a rising actor whose face is ruined by a gangster; Naomi Ackie plays Caitlin Corr, the fringe scientist who rebuilds him out of something that isn't quite flesh. Max Minghella, Eddie Marsan and David Dencik round out the cast.
It's rated R for "strong bloody violence, gore, language, some nudity and brief drug use," cost a reported $40 million, and opens on October 23. Critics' screenings started last week, and the people at them were allowed to post short reactions on October 14. Full reviews are embargoed until Wednesday, October 21. One arrived early.
What the 'freakishly awesome' camp is cheering
The first reactions lean hard toward the gore, and they mean it as praise:
- Brandon Davis, YouTube host and former ComicBook.com presenter — "#Clayface is freakishly awesome."
- DCU Brief — "a shockingly gruesome horror that holds NOTHING back."
- Chris Killian, ComicBook.com — "It molds Matt Hagen's tragic backstory into a wildly gory spectacle."
- Jenna Anderson, Phase Hero — "disgusting, inventive, and astonishingly funny and earnest."
- Chalice Williams, Geeks of Color — "one of the best horrors of the year."
The lead gets almost as much attention as the effects. Harries is best known as the DJ Axel Collins in Netflix's White Lines and as the guest lead of a 2024 Doctor Who episode, which makes this a very large jump.
"This should be a huge breakout for Tom Rhys Harries," Multiverse of Color's Breeze Riley wrote.
He plays both halves of the role: the self-assured actor Matt is at the start, and the thing Caitlin turns him into.
What kind of horror movie it is
Not a superhero movie with a scary villain. Almost every reaction that tries to place Clayface skips the superhero shelf and goes straight to cult horror. The two titles that keep coming up are David Cronenberg's The Fly and Sam Raimi's Darkman, which /Film's Bill Bria and critic Edward Douglas both named.
The rest of the comparisons point the same way, toward old, cheap and nasty:
- The B-movie — IGN's Jim Vejvoda traced it to "hardboiled revenge thrillers and low-budget horror flicks of the '50s and '60s."
- The recent one — Swedish outlet MovieZine boiled it down to "'Joker' meets 'The Substance' in Gotham City."
- The double-edged one — Rolling Stone freelancer Ryan Gaur called it a tribute to "the silly, gory horror B movie where barely anyone talks like a real person."
That's a lineup of revenge stories, mad scientists and ruined faces, and the one film from a comic book on the list is a villain story too. None of the titles has a cape in it.
Nobody who has seen it describes it as a superhero movie. That's the first sign of how little the rest of the DCU matters here.
Whether that's good news depends on what you came for. Peter Gray's own reaction warned that it's "dark, violent, with little levity to offset the nastiness," which for a Halloween horror release is close to a selling point and for a DC movie is close to a warning.
How much DC do you need to know?
None, according to the people who've seen it. The clearest answer came from Collider's editor-in-chief Steven Weintraub.
The film "doesn't require any knowledge of DC to enjoy," Weintraub wrote after his screening.
Bill Bria put it as the film's whole design: "a movie that works on its own first, all shared universe considerations secondary."
The timeline backs them up. Gunn has confirmed on Threads that the story takes place before 2025's Superman, so it doesn't build on anything from the earlier DCU films. Here's everything a newcomer could worry about missing:
- Superman — no need; Clayface happens before it.
- Creature Commandos — the animated series gave Clayface a brief appearance, voiced by Alan Tudyk. Tudyk isn't in the film, which tells Matt Hagen's origin from the beginning.
- Batman — the only full review so far reports that the film never mentions him and contains no Easter eggs.
- Gotham — the city is the setting, but you don't need a map of it. The production built it in Liverpool.
The half that isn't sold
The enthusiasm isn't universal, and the doubters aren't complaining about the gore. They're asking what this movie is for. Shahbaz of The Movie Podcast called it "an odd third entry for a DCU still finding its identity."
The first full review landed on October 19, two days ahead of the embargo, and it became the first Clayface review on Rotten Tomatoes. ComicBookMovie.com's Josh Wilding gave it 2.5 stars out of 5.
"It should have been a game-changer for the genre; instead, it's DC's Morbius moment," Wilding wrote.
That's a pointed comparison: Morbius was Sony's 2022 villain-led spin-off, and it became a punchline. Early social reactions come from studio-invited screenings and usually run warm. Wednesday's reviews will show whether the Morbius line is the outlier or the first of many.
For the record: Sam Raimi made Darkman in 1990 only after he couldn't get the pulp hero he actually wanted. "Universal Studios wouldn't give me the rights to that," he said of The Shadow.
Previously we wrote: Jeremy Saulnier's Halloween slasher used to be called October — now it's coming out in January