Life’s great for actor Matt Hagen (Tom Rhys Harries) when he arrives on set, one morning. Coming from ‘the Narrows’ – the most impoverished, tough neighbourhood in Gotham city – Hagen has paved his way to becoming the hottest upcoming actor in Coast City (possibly a stand-in for Los Angeles). And with his name being announced as an Oscar nominee, the ‘buzz’ around him understandably goes stratospheric. Hagen takes his best friend Corey (Joshua James) for a celebratory weekend on a private jet. The weekend quickly turns into a nightmare, as Hagen flirts with the girlfriend of the most dreaded mobster in Gotham, Markos Szabo (David Dencik), despite Corey’s words of caution. The one-night stand ends with Hagen waking up to find his bed surrounded by Szabo and his men. He doesn’t take kindly to Hagen’s transgression, using a razor to carve his face beyond recognition. Just like that, a blooming life is knocked into hell.Clayface, directed by James Watkins, based on a screenplay by Mike Flanagan and Hosseini Amir, is the kind of irreverent take on Hollywood (like Coralie Fargeat’s The Substance, 2024) that usually makes me sit up. However, Watkin’s film does something better, where a mutilated and wronged celebrity isn’t just fighting to get back his Hollywood career, but also gradually discovering his stomach for revenge against those who set him off on this path. Matt Hagen, a soft-spoken and grounded leading man, wading through the uncertain seas of fame, suddenly finds himself on his way to becoming a vengeful, bitter anti-hero. Ruined by his business manager Frank Fitzpatrick (Eddie Marsan) and dropped by his agent (Nancy Caroll) after multiple reconstructive surgeries can’t bring him back to looking anywhere like he used to, Hagen’s life plummets from the highs of showbiz royalty to his late mother’s one-room apartment in the Narrows.Also read: ‘Digger’ is a Blockbuster-Sized Waste of a Carbon FootprintWhile deliberating over what his future looks like, he comes across the work of Dr Caitlyn Corr (Naomi Ackie) – who has been working on some kind of fringe science cure, using ‘Nanites’, which after being injected into the body, identify degenerative tissues and fix them. No points for guessing who becomes the first volunteer for her human trial. Hagen’s pitch to Dr. Corr is compelling. She doesn’t have funding, permission or a volunteer for human trials, he has nothing left to lose. Dying in the process might be a form of mercy.Screengrab from the official trailer of Clayface, Photo: YouTube/DC, Warner Bros.Watkins’ film is closer to the Batman films by Matt Reeves, even though it’s been listed as a part of James Gunn’s DC universe. Despite the overall pace imbibing a frictionless franchise film, the tone is grittier, and the screenplay by Flanagan and Amir decidedly wants to relish the R-rated roots of the film. We see jaws melt, scissors poking the eyes in the lavatory of a plane facing turbulence, almost like a horrific version of Cinderella – where Matt has to be indoors before midnight. Corer, as much as she’s fascinated with the developments with her test case, also becomes attached to him more closely than she would like. As she observes Hagen while he’s asleep through a monitor, we discover he can shape-shift and become the person he’s thinking about. Since he still doesn’t know how to control it, he does it subconsciously. In one of the film’s best jumpscares, Corr discovers his feelings for her, after he turns into her while asleep.The science-fiction is slightly inconsistent with Hagen realising his powers in real time, so the makers take a few liberties, here and there. As he begins meeting the people who wronged him, a trail of bodies are left behind. Corr’s long-term fiancé, John Borrelli (Max Minghella), among the handful of cops in Gotham not on Szabo’s payroll, becomes increasingly suspicious of Hagen, as his name keeps coming up as being related to all victims. Screengrab from the official trailer of Clayface, Photo: YouTube/DC, Warner Bros.Szabo is a cartoonishly thin villain, not characterised with care unlike Vincent D’Onofrio’s Kingpin in Daredevil. Hagen’s transformation is the more interesting arc here, which becomes an allegory for the modern celebrity. Most actors are so busy code-switching between personas in their jobs, or when they’re in a pressline at a film festival, a press junket of 20 interviews with varying degrees of interest in the film, the long podcast, the late-night TV shows, does one even remember who the real person is? Similarly, as Hagen starts to shape-shift as others – will he even remember the real Matt Hagen, who hails from the Narrows, and whose dream it was to become an actor?Also read: In ‘Primetime’, Robert Pattinson Steers a Muggy, Diseased Version of the American DreamWatkins, who earlier directed Speak No Evil (2024), starring James McAvoy as a charismatic psychopath, is intrigued by the psychological horror his protagonist is going through. But he’s not uptight about it, loosening up in a deliriously B-movie scene, where Hagen transforms into multiple people to reach Szabo, inside his nightclub. It’s a stunning homage to John Carpenter’s The Thing (1982), making the audience paranoid about who is real and who is impersonating.Screengrab from the official trailer of Clayface, Photo: YouTube/DC, Warner Bros.Clayface, like a franchise film mandated to have a runtime of under two hours, rushes towards the climax. It’s messy, pulpy, sometimes predictable (especially for genre fans), but it has the good sense of embracing its grotesqueness. Tom Rhys Harries announces himself as a leading man and Naomi Ackie grounds proceedings considerably. For a film about a man that can become anyone, Clayface understands the real horror might be no longer knowing yourself.*Clayface is currently playing in theatres