If James Gunn’s Superman was made for the classic superhero crowd, Clayface is the DCU entry built for horror fans. That is the shape of Deadline’s verdict, and the reviews landing alongside it mostly agree on the essentials: this is a gruesome, R-rated origin story that works because of the actor at its center, even when the script around him wobbles.

Tom Rhys Harries plays Matt Hagen, a rising actor whose face is his whole career, until an attack leaves him disfigured and finished in the business overnight. He pins his comeback on an experimental treatment, and it gives him his looks back, then starts turning him into something else. What follows is a revenge story told as body horror, the first DCU film set in Gotham and the first built entirely around a villain, with no Batman anywhere in it.

The script comes from horror writer Mike Flanagan, significantly reworked by Drive writer Hossein Amini, and director James Watkins (Speak No Evil) leans all the way into the genre. Deadline’s Glenn Garner calls it worth the price of admission and hopes it becomes a roadmap for the DCU: smaller, genre-driven films built around a character instead of a crossover. The budget tells the same story, a reported $40 million, a fraction of a standard superhero production.

Here is where the take splits from the mixed notices. Several critics call the tone messy and the final act undercooked, and they may be right. But read the pans closely and a pattern jumps out: nearly every review, including the negative ones, stops to praise Harries. He has to play a vain, charming leading man, a casualty, and then a monster who is still recognizably the same wounded person, and by every account the performance holds all three without losing the thread. Naomi Ackie, as the scientist behind the treatment, gets the same treatment from critics: a Frankenstein figure played as a person rather than a plot device.

That is the story inside the story. Clayface is a film about an actor destroyed by losing his face, released by a studio betting that a lesser-known villain and a rising actor can open a movie with no hero in sight. If it works this weekend, it will not be because of franchise machinery. It will be because audiences showed up for a performance. That is the DCU experiment actually worth watching, and it makes Clayface the most interesting test case the genre has produced this year.

‘Clayface’ is in theaters Thursday, October 22.

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