Horror Film Review: Clayface (dir. by James Watkins)

Posted on October 24, 2026 by Arleigh

“Even if it kills me, I’ll be better off than I am now.” — Matt Hagen

The most unsettling thing about Clayface isn’t watching a man lose his face; it’s realizing how much of his life was built around having the right one. James Watkins’ take on the DC villain turns that insecurity into a nasty little body-horror tragedy, following someone who has confused being desirable with being worth something. Beneath the collapsing features and increasingly grotesque transformations is a recognizable fear: that losing the thing people admire about you means losing their interest altogether. The film doesn’t explore that idea as deeply as it could, but it gives the horror a compelling emotional foundation beyond the spectacle of a comic-book monster taking shape.

At the center is Matt Hagen, played by Tom Rhys Harries, an actor whose rising career is derailed by a disfiguring attack. His appearance has opened doors for him, and losing it threatens more than his next role. It destroys the version of himself he thought he could count on. Desperate for a way back, he turns to Dr. Caitlyn Corr, played by Naomi Ackie, whose experimental treatment promises to repair the damage. Naturally, the results come with complications. The interesting question isn’t whether the miracle will turn into a nightmare, but how much Matt is willing to overlook once he starts recognizing himself in the mirror again.

That desperation makes Matt more compelling than a character who simply gets powers and becomes dangerous. His problem begins before his body starts changing: he already depends on other people to tell him what he’s worth. That insecurity connects naturally to his profession. An actor who can physically become someone else sounds like a wish fulfilled, until transformation stops being a choice. There’s a cruel logic to giving someone obsessed with recovering his identity a body that won’t hold one. The screenplay occasionally spells things out too neatly, but the central idea gives the nastiness something to work with beyond its shock value.

Harries does a lot to keep that idea grounded. He makes Matt’s appeal believable without turning him into someone whose suffering automatically excuses everything he does. His desperation is understandable even when his choices become selfish or disturbing, and the performance handles that balance well. His humiliation doesn’t immediately become theatrical rage. It lingers, making him defensive, needy, and increasingly willing to justify himself. Even when the movie pushes him toward more recognizable villain territory, Harries preserves traces of the frightened person underneath. Matt doesn’t have to remain likable to remain interesting, and the performance understands the difference between earning sympathy and demanding it.

Ackie gives the film another human connection that it needs. Corr could have been little more than the scientist who introduces the treatment and explains why everybody should be worried. Instead, her warmth complicates a relationship already shaped by unequal needs. Matt wants his life back; she wants her work to succeed. Those desires overlap without being identical, making their connection more engaging than the mechanics of the experiment. The romantic element also gives their scenes a tragic-monster quality. Not every emotional beat lands with equal force, but the performances keep their relationship from feeling like a mandatory break between transformations.

Those transformations are where Watkins delivers the movie’s most immediate pleasures, assuming “pleasures” is the right word for watching somebody’s anatomy stop cooperating. The real discomfort comes from the instability. A face should stay recognizable even when everything else changes, and Clayface makes that familiarity feel temporary. The makeup and prosthetic work give Matt’s deterioration an unpleasant physical texture, encouraging a queasy fascination with damage that’s difficult to look at and harder to ignore. At its best, the body horror feels wet, awkward, and difficult to contain rather than polished into something comfortably spectacular. There’s enough physical nastiness here to give Matt’s desperation a genuinely disturbing shape.

Even without the DC Comics pedigree or the connection to Batman, Clayface would still be a compelling body-horror film. The recognizable name might get people interested, but Matt’s desperation, the disturbing effects, and the tragedy of losing control over his identity are what make it work. There’s no need to know where he fits into Gotham or who he might eventually fight. His story has enough emotional weight and gruesome imagination to stand on its own. The comic-book background adds another layer, but it isn’t holding the movie together. That independence makes it feel like an actual horror story rather than franchise homework dressed up with gore.

For an R-rated body-horror film, though, Clayface plays it surprisingly safe. That might sound odd given the grotesque imagery, but graphic violence and genuinely unsettling ideas aren’t the same thing. There are moments when Matt’s transformation seems ready to take the movie somewhere stranger, only for it to retreat toward familiar revenge-thriller territory. The issue isn’t simply that it needs more blood or more elaborate effects. A more Cronenbergian approach could have pushed further into how his changing body alters his desires, his relationships, and his understanding of himself. The film is willing to make Matt look monstrous, but more hesitant to explore what becoming something other than human might actually feel like.

That restraint becomes especially noticeable as Matt gains control over his abilities. Early on, his body feels like a threat he can’t escape. Later, it increasingly becomes a weapon. The shift makes sense for the story, but it changes the experience from watching someone endure a nightmare to watching him inflict one. There’s nasty fun in that, especially when the film embraces its lurid side, but his inability to trust his own body generates more unease than his ability to make other people afraid of it. As the confrontations become more conventional, the movie sacrifices some of the uncertainty that makes its earlier stretches so effective.

The comparisons with The Fly and Darkman are hard to avoid, from scientific possibility curdling into catastrophe to the disfigured man pursuing revenge. The relationship between appearance and personal value also invites comparisons with The Substance. Those connections help explain the film’s appeal, but they highlight what feels underdeveloped, too. Clayface has an industry full of people who judge surfaces and a protagonist whose surface becomes impossible to maintain. That’s fertile ground. Sometimes the movie digs into it; sometimes it settles for a familiar revenge beat with a more disgusting visual payoff. The latter can be entertaining without being quite as satisfying.

Even with those reservations, Clayface succeeds because enough humanity survives beneath the grotesquerie. Harries gives the film a wounded center, while Ackie helps keep its emotional stakes from disappearing into the effects work. Watkins delivers the gruesome spectacle, but the sadness underneath gives it staying power. The film doesn’t fully realize its strongest ideas, and its reluctance to follow them into truly uncomfortable territory keeps it from becoming something exceptional. Still, its best moments make physical transformation feel painfully personal. Matt can change his appearance, but finding a face he can live with turns out to be the harder problem.

Icarus File No. 6: The Man Who Killed Don Quixote (dir by Terry Gilliam)

Posted on January 1, 2022 by Lisa Marie Bowman

For many years, The Man Who Killed Don Quixote was a film best known for not having been made.

In the past, we’ve used the Icarus Files as a way to write about filmmakers who flew too close to the sun of their own ambition and who plunged down to the sea as a result. However, in the case of The Man Who Killed Don Quixote, the sun is not director Terry Gilliam’s ambition. Instead, the sun is a combination of shady financiers, natural disasters, and film industry silliness that seemed to all conspire to keep Gilliam from making his film. And yet, unlike the real Icarus, Gilliam insisted on continuing to fly, regardless of how many times he crashed into the ocean.

Terry Gilliam first started to talk about adapting Migel de Cervantes’s Don Quixote into a film in the late 80s. The tale of a Spanish nobleman who becomes convinced that he’s fighting giants when he’s actually only jousting with windmills, Don Quixote sounded like an obvious project for Gilliam. Gilliam’s films have always dealt with the power and importance of imagination. However, it’s often forgotten that Gilliam’s protagonists are often both saved and eventually destroyed by fantasy. (One need only think about the end of Time Bandits, in which the young main character goes on the journey of a lifetime but then watches as his parents blow up in front of him.) It’s easy to forget that Don Quixote dies at the end of Cervantes’s tale, having regained his sanity and having announced that his niece will be disinherited if she marries a man who has ever read a book about chivalry.

From 1990 to 1997, Gilliam started pre-production on his version of Don Quixote several times, just for the production to be canceled. Sometimes, this was due to Gilliam not being able to get the budget that he felt would be necessary to bring his vision to life. Frustrated with the Hollywood studio system, Gilliam wanted to raise the money for and make his movie in Europe but this turned out to lead to a whole new set of financial and regulatory complications.

Filming finally started on the film in 2000, with Jean Rochefort playing a former film actor who thinks that he’s Don Quixote and Johnny Depp playing the director who fills the role of Sancho Panza. Unfortunately, as shown in the poignant documentary Lost in La Mancha, the production seemed to be almost cursed from the start. The footage from the first day of shooting was unusable, due to planes flying overhead. The 2nd day of shooting was ruined by a flash flood that swept away much of the set. Jean Rochefort injured himself and, despite his best efforts to act through the pain, he had to step away from the role. Filming was suspended in 2000 and, for the next 16 years, Gilliam tried to find a way to get the stalled film started up again. Many actors came and went, including Robert Duvall and, most promisingly, John Hurt. Hurt agreed to play the role of Quixote but, just when it seemed that the film was finally going to go into production, Hurt passed away from pancreatic cancer. A few months later, the original Quixote, Jean Rochefort, also passed away. The film went back into limbo.

Finally, in 2016, a producer named Paulo Branco offered to fund the film. Pre-production started up again, this time with Adam Driver in the Sancho Panza role and Michael Palin playing Quixote. However, the project was soon once again stalled, as Branco wanted creative control of the film. When Branco slashed both the budget of the film and Palin’s already reduced salary, Gilliam denounced Branco’s actions. Branco suspended production but, by this point, Gilliam had already hooked up with another set of producers. Jonathan Pryce replaced Michael Palin as Don Quixote and, finally, Terry Gilliam’s The Man Who Killed Don Quixote was filmed!

Once filming was complete, however, Paulo Branco popped up yet again. Claiming that he owned the rights to the story and not Terry Gilliam, he sued to keep the film from being distributed. The courts ruled in Branco’s favor but Gilliam countered that he hadn’t used one frame of footage that had been shot while Branco was serving as producer and that, while Branco had the rights to his version of The Man Who Killed Don Quixote, he did not have the rights to Gilliam’s. While the lawyers argued, Amazon Studios withdrew from an agreement to distribute the film. Once the case was finally settled, The Man Who Killed Don Quixote was finally given a haphazard release in a few countries, often in edited form.

And that’s a shame because The Man Who Killed Don Quixote is a delight. It’s a film that is both playful and snarky, a celebration of imagination that also serves as a satire of Hollywood narcissism. Adam Driver plays Toby Grummett, a director who returns to a Spanish village to direct an big-budget, epic adaptation of Don Quixote. Ten years earlier, as a student filmmaker, Grummett shot a previous adaptation of Don Quixote in the same village. When he tracks down the old shoemaker (Jonathan Pryce), who starred in his student film, he discovers that the shoemaker thinks that he is Quixote and that he’s become something of a tourist attraction.

And from there, the film follows Don Quixote as he takes Toby on a quest to fight giants and protect the helpless and to live a life of chilvary. Along the way, Toby finds himself getting caught up in Quixote’s elaborate fantasy world. It leads to a lot of comedy but there’s also something rather poignant about the old shoemaker’s attempts to be a hero and Toby rediscovering the love of fantasy and the imagination that he had when he was a film student. And yet, it would be a mistake to assume that this film is simply a light-hearted fantasy. The laughs are tinged with melancholy. The enemies that Quixote and Toby meet are not just imaginary giants. This a film that mixes comedy and tragedy in a way that few other films have the courage to do so.

As is typical with Gilliam’s later films, it bites off a bit more than it can chew but it’s still hard not to get caught up in it. Driver and Pryce are both wonderfully cast and the film’s satire of the film business carries a sting to it. Watching the film, it becomes apparent that Gilliam sees himself as being both Quixote and Toby. The film’s ending seems to be Gilliam’s defiant message that he will always choose to fight the giants.