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Cult Review
Senior Film Conservator
The first time we see Mollie King’s nameless sculptor press her thumb into the wet ochre, the screen holds so tight on the indentation that the surrounding clay seems to inhale. It is as though the film itself is learning to breathe. What follows is not a ghost story in any classical sense, but a slow transfusion of spirit into soil, a reverse autopsy where the corpse precedes the life.
Director-writer Human Clay refuses the tidy taxonomy of folk horror or psychodrama, preferring instead the liminal smear that coalesces when grief is left to ferment. The camera—operated by veteran DP Yelena Vassilieva—glides over workbenches littered with rasps and rifflers, treating them like surgical instruments in a morgue that has forgotten the dignity of bodies. Every chisel scrape is mixed so high it becomes percussion, a brittle metronome counting down to the moment the sculptor’s own epidermis will be offered as pigment.
There is no score in the traditional sense; composer Ryo Murakami embeds sub-20 Hz frequencies that swell whenever the clay is kneaded. The effect is not unlike standing beneath a cathedral organ whose pipes exhale mildew. You don’t hear the note—you surrender your stomach to it. By the time King begins grafting strips of her forearm into the sculpture, the sound has become memory, a cellular chisel rewriting the viewer’s own bodily history.
Cinephiles will reach for comparisons—The Goddess for its sacrificial artist trope, Mystic Faces for its chiaroscuro obsession with portraiture—but Human Clay sidesteps their moral absolutes. Here, creation is not redemption or damnation; it is a sedimentary process where identity is deposited one lamina at a time until the original landscape is unreadable.
King, primarily known for brittle socialite roles, undergoes a metamorphosis as imperceptible as it total. Watch her pupils in the sequence where the clay first speaks: they do not dilate so much as bruise. She achieves the uncanny valley from the human side, letting the life-force leak out rather than pumping the vessel full of actorly vigor. It is a performance you measure in ounces of lost plasma, not in beats per minute.
The supporting cast is intentionally spectral. A delivery boy appears only as gloved hands sliding a crate of clay through a doorway; a former lover is reduced to a silhouette reflected in a puddle of turpentine. By vacating interpersonal geography, the film forces us to inhabit the sculptor’s solipsistic cosmos, a universe where every external presence is merely a rumor of flesh.
Production designer Tania Kolarik sources pigments from iron-oxide quarries in Bosnia, then bakes them at varying temperatures to produce a chromatic scale that runs from dried blood to wet liver. When projected in 4K, the grain of the clay resembles diseased lung tissue; you half expect spores to drift through the projector beam. The tactility is so aggressive that my notebook bears fingernail grooves I do not remember making.
Compare this to the baroque maximalism of Le peripezie dell’emulo di Fortunello, where sets vomit ornamentation into every crevice. Human Clay instead weaponizes negative space: the studio’s cracked skylight becomes a diaphragm, wheezing dusk into the room, turning dust motes into a second cast of characters.
Editor Miloš Radakovich cuts on the sound of skin peeling rather than on visual cues, creating a synesthetic disorientation. The consequence is narrative that molts: scenes begin mid-action, leaving vestigial tails of footage that slither offscreen. Try to reconstruct a conventional three-act skeleton and you end up clutching a handful of damp scales.
This approach peaks in the sequence where the sculptor attempts to murder her creation with a looped wire. The film jump-cuts between the wire tightening, her own throat flushing vermilion, and archival footage of surgeons stitching shrapnel wounds during the Balkan conflict. History, memory, and fiction collapse into a single suffocating larynx.
Where The Heart of a Lion sentimentalizes the artist who triumphs over trauma, Human Clay posits that survival is merely the prolongation of a wound. The sculptor’s final act is not suicide but abdication: she allows the clay-woman to absorb the last of her recollections, reducing herself to a husk that continues to walk, smile, and pay electricity bills—a flesh automaton sans biography.
It is here that the film achieves its most chilling coup: the realization that the creature, now animate, will repeat the cycle. Somewhere in another garret, a new block of earth waits to be moistened by someone else’s plasma. Art is not immortal; it is a parasite that jumps hosts.
Human Clay dialogues with Die Gespensteruhr’s obsession with time as mutable clay, yet discards that film’s clockwork determinism for something far more bacterial. Likewise, the maternal abjection of The Mother Instinct is present, only redirected from womb to workshop, from nurture to knead.
Even the maritime fatalism of The Sea Flower finds its echo in the clay’s tidal memory: every high tide of creativity is followed by an eroding low, until the shoreline of identity is unrecognizable. Yet Human Clay refuses cathartic tempests; its horror is low-pressure, a cold drizzle that seeps into marrow over years.
Philosophically, the film excavates the etymological root of “impression” as press into. What is an artist if not a conduit that receives the dent of experience, then transfers that indentation onto another surface? Yet each transfer loses resolution, like Xeroxing a Xerox until the face dissolves into a spectral oval. Eventually the imprint becomes a debt rather than a document.
In that sense, Human Clay is less a story than a slow-payment schedule on a mortgage of memory. By the closing shot—an 8-minute static frame of the clay-woman staring into a mirror that reflects nothing—the balance is overdue, and compound interest has devoured the debtor.
To call Human Clay “haunting” is to understate its post-haunt capacity; it does not linger in your house—it evicts you from it. Days after viewing, I found myself avoiding ceramics aisles in supermarkets, flinching at the smell of wet gravel after rain. The film secretes an ontological residue more persistent than any jump-scare.
It is, without hyperbole, the most devastating meditation on art and artist since The Goddess, yet it offers no redemptive transcendence. Instead, it delivers a diagnosis: to create is to be flayed in slow motion, and the flayer is always the next project waiting on the sill, drying in the moonlight like a newly skinned hide.
Go see it—preferably in a theater equipped with sub-bass transducers—but do not expect to leave whole. You will exit lighter by exactly the weight of a human soul, compressed into a thumbprint of clay.
IMDb 5
1927
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