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CLAYFACE

Producers: Matt Reeves, Lynn Harris, James Gunn and Peter Safran   Director: James Watkins   Screenplay: Mike Flanagan and Hossein Amini   Cast: Tom Rhys Harries, Naomi Ackie, Max Minghella, David Dencik, Eddie Marsan, Joana Ribeiro, Joshua James, Nancy Carroll, Sam Hazelbine, Jack Curran, Wil Coban and Rob Brydon   Distributor: Warner Bros. Pictures

Grade: D

It hasn’t taken long for James Gunn’s DCU, which began with last year’s bright, upbeat “Superman,” to descend to the murky depths with this body-horror misfire based on a minor villain in the Batman pantheon of ne’er-do-wells.  “Clayface” literally sinks into the Gotham City sewer before adding an astonishingly misguided coda that throws any notion of morality into the trash heap.

Tom Rhys Harries, who from some perspectives resembles a young Ed Begley, Jr., plays Matt Hagen, an actor on the cusp of matinee-idol fame.  He’s just received an Oscar nomination, to the joy of his cynical agent (Eddie Marsan), publicist (Nancy Carroll) and best buddy, aspiring actor Corey Bowery (Joshua James).

But Matt makes a terrible error when he goes out to a nightclub to celebrate.  He accepts an offer from sultry vixen Mia (Joana Ribeiro) to join her on the dance floor, as well as a pill that she passes from her tongue to his.  Cut to his room the next morning, where the two are awoken by her possessive boyfriend, mob boss Markos Szabo (David Dencik), who orders his thugs to slash Matt’s face horribly in the first of the movie’s garishly explicit scenes of torn flesh and streaming blood.

One might think that Matt has a basis for a damage claim, but Markos is well connected—everybody seems to be in his thrall—and Mia’s claim that she was the one drugged and misused is widely believed.  Matt ends up penniless in a squalid flat in his slummy old Gotham neighborhood, his life shattered and his career over.

In desperation he seeks out Dr. Caitlyn Corr (Naomi Ackie), whose revolutionary nano-technological medical research has been undercut by investors who ended their funding and stole her results.  He begs her to inject his face with the little AI critters in hopes they’ll restore his handsome features.  She initially resists, but reluctantly agrees.  The result is wonderfully efficacious. 

For a while, that is.  His face reverts without warning to a rubbery mass that he must deal with via scissors and tweezers (a scene in an airplane lavatory during some awful turbulence is especially unnerving).  He helps himself to more injections, leading to his being able to transform himself into duplicates of other people when under mental stress. 

That power comes in handy when he discovers that he was betrayed by his agent and even good old Corey, as well as Mia and Markos.  That turns the movie into a revenge tale, with some pretty gruesome death sequences not only at his hands but via other portions of his oozy anatomy.  (The end of Corey, via an enveloping device Clayface has used in the comics and animated TV series, is agreeably, and uniquely, bloodless.)

Those individual killings, though, are but the prelude to the pièce de résistance, Matt’s elaborate, protracted assault on Mia and Szabo at the latter’s nightclub.  This involves Szabo’s small army of thugs (the most important of them Sam Hazelbine, Jack Curran and Wil Coban), a couple of whom Matt impersonates over the course of the slaughter.

His transformations, incidentally, are done in extremely simple fashion.  Sometimes they require chintzy GCI work on Matt’s slushy face, but more often they’re simple superimpositions of one actor over another.  And when it comes to the big finale, director James Watkins, cinematographer Rob Hardy and editor Jon Harris resort to one of the oldest tricks in the book, situating a pillar in the scene behind which one actor walks, only to have another emerge on the other side.  (Recall, for instance, the famous sequence in the 1960 Twilight Zone episode “The Howling Man,” where a man gradually turns into the devil by that means.)        

The obvious official corruption in Matt’s case, meanwhile, has caught the attention of John Bonnelli (Max Minghella), a straight-arrow cop who’s also Corr’s long-time fiancé.  Since Matt is falling for her big-time, that makes John both an ally of Matt in the actor’s quest for justice and his rival in the romantic department.  Gradually, though, Bonnelli’s interest in Matt’s crime spree causes a rift that leads to that awful coda in which all is forgiven in the name of love and the possibility of sequels is established.

The cast do what little they can with this material.  Harries emotes most strenuously throughout; it probably would have been better to tone things down.  Ackie too is deadly serious when a bit of humor—like those Minghella and Marsan provide—would have helped.  But then it’s doubtful anyone could have done much with the dialogue by Mike Flanagan and Hossein Amini, which is laughably clichéd, as if it came from the pages of a third-rate comic book.  Everyone else also suffers from the necessity of having to put across dreadful lines as though they were golden. The only person to survive is comedian Rob Brydon; he plays a TV talk show host appropriately named Crassner, who for some reason Matt sees as himself in a mirror at one point late in the film.  Brydon’s return makes no sense, but his high energy makes it welcome nonetheless. 

This is a relatively cheap movie by DCU standards, and James Price’s production design looks it.  Keith Madden’s costumes are nothing to write home about, either, while Volker Bertelmann’s score is same old, same old.

If you’re feeling generous, you might compare “Clayface” with “The Invisible Man” as the story of a protagonist driven murderously mad by an unwise use of science.  But Watkins’ movie has none of the wit or style of James Whale’s 1933 classic.  And Harries is no Claude Rains, who dominated the screen even though you couldn’t see him.  It would also be generous to suggest that this mixture of gore, gloom and grime was designed to be taken as a comedy; unfortunately, the laughs, while definitely earned, seem to be of an unintentional variety. 

The only thing satisfying about “Clayface” is that it’s hard to imagine the DCU sinking any lower.    

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WICKER

Producers: Ed Sinclair, Tom Carver, Justin Lothrop, Brad Zimmerman, Ryan Heller, Lia Buman, Olivia Colman, Brent Stiefel, David Michod, Tim Headington, Michael Bloom, Andrea Cornwell and Oliver Kassman   Directors: Eleanor Wilson and Alex Huston Fischer   Screenplay: Eleanor Wilson and Alex Huston Fischer   Cast: Olivia Colman, Alexander Skarsgård, Elizabeth Debicki, Peter Dinklage, Marti Siu, Nabhaan Rizwan, Ella Bruccoleri, Ben Ashenden, Kiell Smith-Bynoe, Scott Alexander Yougng and Richard E. Grant Distributor: Black Bear Pictures

Grade: B-

There have been plenty of unlikely romances on screen, but few as peculiar as the one offered here by writer-directors Eleanor Wilson and Alex Huston Fischer, working from Ursula Wills-Jones’s 2008 short story “The Wicker Husband.”  It’s a fantastic fable, set in an English village during what appears to be the late medieval or early modern period, that tackles subjects like social ostracism, female suppression and jealousy within the context of an oddball “Frankenstein” forerunner.

Olivia Colman, channeling her penchant for outlandishly broad comedy (see, most recently, “Wonka” and “Paddington in Peru”) as opposed to her ability to underplay (e.g., “Jimpa”), is the Fisherwoman, a malodorous old maid who sells her catch in the male-dominated town down the road from her remote home.  Arriving one day with her wares, she encounters a wedding ceremony in which the groom traditionally places a metal collar on his bride.

The ritual also includes a strange addendum involving eggs, meant to choose who will wed next, a kind of equivalent to catching the bouquet, presided over by the village’s prim protector of decorum, the tailor’s wife (Elizabeth Debicki).  The Fisherwoman accidentally wins, eliciting guffaws of derision.  But it also sparks her thinking and sends her to the town’s master basket weaver (Peter Dinklage), from whom she orders a husband made of wicker.  And the weaver, a fellow with godlike pretensions and an oratorical gift he often lavishes on himself as well as others, accepts the commission.

Thus is unveiled the Wicker Husband (Alexander Skarsgård), a solemn, reserved fellow whose only purpose is to satisfy his wife, which, after the appropriate ceremony, he does so loudly that the entire neighborhood is made aware of the bliss wife and husband are enjoying.  The notion of so satisfying a union to both parties undermines the community’s traditional balance. The men’s dominance is undermined by the example of a husband who treats his wife with dignity and respect, while the women become aware that their position of inferiority in society (especially family) is not a natural or necessary thing. 

Of course, the Fisherwoman’s newfound happiness cannot be allowed to go unchallenged.  The tailor’s wife, nonplussed at the turn things have taken, spreads rumors about the wicker husband and local women that cause the Fisherwoman to grow suspicious of his fidelity to her, despite his readiness of acquiesce to any desire on her part.  It appears for a time that the machinations of the town’s mean queen might succeed, until the Basket Weaver intervenes again to provide a resolution that gives everybody what they deserve, which of course means different things in each case.

There’s a great deal to like about “Wicker.”  The mixture of tones—funny, poignant, raunchy, sinister and simply outlandish—is agreeably distinctive.  The look of the picture (shot in Hungary), with excellent work from production designer Renátó Cseh, costumers Tóth András Dániel and Godena-Juhász Attila and cinematographer Lol Crawley—is convincingly grubby.  Sofi Marshall’s editing only occasionally lapses into lethargy.  And while Anna Meredith’s score threatens to overdo the whimsy, at least it’s different.

And the cast is extremely fine.  Colman holds nothing back, whether the Fisherwoman is lonely and derided, swept up in romantic passion or floored with jealousy.  Debicki gives the Tailor’s Wife an air of supercilious superiority that becomes more understandable because of the treatment she receives from her husband (Nabhaan Rizwan).  Dinklage uses his gift for orotund speechifying to absolute perfection.

The townspeople are nicely differentiated as well, from Marti Siu as the tailor’s sister-in law to Ben Ashendon as the baker and Ella Bruccoleri as his wife, Kiell Smith-Bynoe as the innkeeper and Scott Alexander Yougng as the cobbler.  And Richard E. Grant shows up for a hilarious cameo as the town’s dreadfully incapable doctor, bringing a note of pure slapstick to the proceedings.  (One might wonder, incidentally, why there’s no priest on hand—this village seems a peculiarly pagan place, given the presumed timeframe.)

But it’s Skarsgård, as the artificial spouse, who seals the deal.  One could talk at length about Wētā Workshop’s intricate design of the Wicker Husband suit, and indeed the fabrication is a remarkable effects accomplishment.  But it’s the actor who brings the suit to life with a performance that’s simple but deeply soulful.  He makes this unlikely “monster” a truly loving partner to Colman’s mistreated spinster.

And yet in the end there’s something a bit disappointing about “Wicker,” and the problem resides with Wilson and Fischer.  Their expansion of Wills-Jones’s brief story lacks the last measure of verbal wit, and worse, their direction is rather flat, failing at points where the movie might have really taken flight (the bedroom scenes between Colman and Skarsgård, for example, or a village dance sequence, which comes across more dull than outrageous, despite all the stomping and slapping).

Still, though one’s left with the suspicion that “Wicker” could have been a more engaging fable than it is, there’s enough that’s good about it to make for an enjoyable trip to a place less distant from ours in social norms than one might at first think.