Clayface (2026) – Review by Andrea Carnevali

Clayface

⭐⭐⭐⭐

A gloriously grotesque body horror film that remembers how much fun it can be to make an audience squirm

First of all, I should say that this is probably one of my favourite DC movies, although admittedly the competition hasn’t been particularly fierce! In fact, thinking about it, I’m struggling to name a single one I actually liked.

What this one seems to do right is that it embraces horror in all its disgusting, grotesque glory, without trying to soften it or turn it into just another superhero movie.

It reminded me of David Cronenberg’s The Fly, with Jeff Goldblum slowly transforming into a disgusting creature, not just physically but mentally too. As his body deteriorates, so does his mind. He becomes increasingly obsessive, nasty and violent, and what begins as a tragedy gradually turns into something genuinely horrifying.

To a certain extent, something similar happens here. We watch a man spiralling into a vortex of horror as his body mutates into something increasingly unrecognisable, and his mind begins to follow.

And boy, does this film go for it!

There were scenes where I actually had to look away, and I’m not a particularly squeamish person. I’ve seen all sorts of horror films and disgusting things over the years, but some of the images here are really quite something.

There’s a certain perverse delight in watching someone’s eyelids seal themselves shut, forcing our main character to try to slice them open with little scissors just to be able to see again. I mean, how revolting is that?!

I’m laughing even as I write this, because some of it is so outrageously gross that it becomes funny. Which, I suspect, is precisely what the filmmakers are going for. The film wants to make you squirm, gasp, laugh nervously and occasionally turn away in disgust. And it succeeds in all of that spectacularly.

At times, it also reminded me of those gloriously excessive horror films from the 1980s, like Brian Yuzna’s Society or Stuart Gordon’s Re-Animator. Those wonderfully deranged, relatively low-budget gore-fests where the filmmakers seemed to be competing to see just how far they could push the practical effects and how much they could disgust their audiences.

Except that here they’ve got a proper budget to play with!

The visual effects are terrific, combining CGI with practical effects in a way that makes the transformations feel horribly physical and tangible. There’s something wonderfully old-fashioned about the sheer inventiveness of the grotesque imagery, even though the technology behind it is obviously far more sophisticated.

But crucially, beneath all this madness, the film works as a story.

The central performance is excellent, and the film somehow manages to make this completely implausible premise feel believable. Obviously, none of what happens makes the slightest bit of sense in the real world, but the film establishes its own rules so convincingly that you accept them. You believe in the character; you understand his desperation and, however outrageous things become, you go along with him.

What I really appreciated is that Clayface works perfectly well as a self-contained film.

Yes, this is obviously part of the wider Batman universe. If you know your comics, you’ll know that Clayface is one of Batman’s villains, and I suspect all this is intended to fit into the larger Gotham City mythology.

But here’s the wonderful thing: you don’t need to know any of that to enjoy it.

You don’t need to have watched six previous films, three television series and a couple of post-credit sequences to understand what’s happening. And you don’t leave the cinema feeling that you’ve just watched a two-hour advertisement for the next instalment.

Clayface has a beginning, a middle and an end, and it works all the better for it.

So if you’re prepared to embrace full-on body horror, in-your-face gore, blood, death and revolting mutations, there’s an awful lot of fun to be had here.