Clay is just your average every day serial killer, born of a twisted home life where his mother died in childbirth and his father—who blamed Clay for her death—treated him with utter distain and outright violent hostility. Clay chooses his victims at random by stretching out his arms like some twisted angel of death awaiting a passerby to brush against his hand. He then follows them home and wreaks his revenge against the world.

President of SRS Cinema Ron Bonk hasn’t stepped behind the camera for nearly a decade, but with CLAY he makes his return to the director’s chair. The film is an interesting production in that it’s wildly ambitious and aggressively non-judgmental. The production follows 2 distinct storylines that ultimately converge into a nightmare finale.

The first tale is of Clay (Wes Reid) who follows a male victim home only to discover his wife is there. He spares the man and later returns to the home. Bearing an uncanny resemblance to the wife’s dead son, Clay begins to accept her as a surrogate mother—providing the love he so longed to receive himself. It’s an interesting plot device because we know all along that if the husband discovers what has been transpiring in the house, the façade will be shattered. The second story is between Clay’s father Sam (Tom Minion) and an 11-year neighbor Jessica (Emma Koziara). This is the tale that Bonk handles deftly; he chiefly sets up the story of Jessica before twisting our thoughts and fears back and forth. Jessica’s home life is teetering on the same kind of emotional dissonance that manufactured Clay. She befriends Sam in what outwardly appears to be based on his own pedophiliac tendencies. Eventually their uncomfortable relationship appears to be benign—but looks can be deceiving. But at the end of the day, when Clay finally totally and completely snaps, his vengeance threatens everyone and everything in proximity to Himself and Sam.

As a writer, Bonk seems to have an innate ability to tell a story and CLAY offers a lot of story to be told. Tragically as a visual storyteller and director, Bonk is lacking in one key area—brevity. Clocking in at nearly two hours, CLAY suffers from painful periods of nothingness. And by nothingness, I mean truly nothing. The film takes a full 11 minutes before the first line of dialogue is uttered. Further expanses of silence ensue although none are as notable as the first. It’s too bad that the film is so tedious because the third act is very well done, it’s just that by the time we get there we only want the movie to be over—and there’s still a solid 30 minutes left. The film falters again in the final seconds as it leaves an open ending suggesting the cycle of violence continues. Now, I for one don’t need or necessarily want a happy ending all the time but the subject matter of CLAY is so bleak that it makes Todd Solondz films look like wellness seminars. That coupled with the exasperating run-time makes CLAY a marginal film at worst, even if at its best it’s a haunting damnation of fractured family life.