Film Review - Clayface (2026)

Clayface is the new DC Studios movie and stars Tom Rhys Harries as Matt Hagen an actor who gets on the wrong side of a Gotham City gangster and has his faced horribly scared as a result, struggling to deal with the loss of his looks and career he goes for an experimental surgery that uses nanotech to repair broken skin cells but the aftereffects can be devastating.

Clayface is fine but it’s also part of a trend that I’ve become so tired of with these comic book shared universe movies and that is where what are traditionally side characters such as villains like Clayface or Morbius or Kraven the Hunter get their own movie primarily because we have a universe to build and also it will prove to be a popular plug for the studios streaming service,

And that sort of thing might work in the world of comic books, but this is a movie and throughout most of this movie I kept thinking to myself “Where’s Batman?” because Batman and Bruce Wayne are as part of Gotham City as its villains are and one without the other as we saw with Columbia’s attempts with their Spider-man villains just does not work as well,

That said however this is nowhere near as bad as Morbius or Madame Web or Kraven the Hunter were and part of that is due to Tom Rhys Harries as Matt Hagen, he does a good job selling both the rising star actor and the grief and trauma of losing his face and career to finally embracing the changes the procedure undergoes does to him, hopefully he gets to go up against either Robert Pattinson’s Batman or someone like Brandon Sklenar from 1923 as the DCU’s Dark Knight,

The film also has some good horror effects reminiscent of 2024’s The Substance although that film did have more of a willingness to embrace its body horror more effectively than this movie does and Naomi Ackie and Eddie Marsan are good as well in their roles plus the film does a good job showing what a rotten city Gotham can be and has been before Batman showed up,

And so that was Clayface and its fine but the days of the shared universe need to end, it doesn’t work anymore and the movies and shows can feel very same same after a while but when your studio becomes part of a new SkyMount Empire anything goes I guess, 2 out of 5.