GRAFTED (2024)

Studio:   Shudder
Director: Sasha Rainbow
Writer:   Mia Maramara, Hweiling Ow, Lee Murray, Sasha Rainbow
Producer: Murray Francis, Leela Menon
Stars:    Joyena Sun, Jess Hong, Eden Hart, Jared Turner, Sepi To’a

Review Score:

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Summary:

Deadly consequences follow a gifted college student who continues her father’s research on a strange skin graft formula to fix a hereditary deformity.

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Synopsis:     Show/Hide Spoilers

As a fascinated child, Wei watches her scientist father Liu create an experimental skin graft formula he hopes will fix the facial deformity they both share. However, the living tissue he develops spreads across his mouth and nostrils, causing Liu to suffocate to death despite Wei furiously slashing at his face.

Continuing her father’s work as a gifted college student with low self-esteem because of her birthmark, Wei is sent from China to stay with her posh Aunty Ling and socialite cousin Angela in New Zealand so she can go to university on a science scholarship. Wei attends a biochemistry class taught by Dr. Featherstone alongside Angela and her popular friends Eve and Jasmine, but the other girls shun Wei as an outsider due to her appearance and unfamiliar customs regarding Chinese cuisine.

With his own research being rejected, Paul sees an opportunity to exploit Wei’s skin graft project, so he makes her his lab assistant. Meanwhile, Wei befriends a homeless man named John with whom she commiserates over his disfigured face.

Remembering that the rare corpse flower had a connection to her father’s work, Wei breaks into a botanical exhibit featuring the flower and steals a portion of the strange plant. By incorporating it into her father’s formula, Wei successfully creates living tissue from her leg with no adverse side effects.

While secretly having sex with Eve in an adjacent room, Paul sees Wei conducting her experiment. Wei proves to Paul that her formula works by showing him how she healed the self-inflicted wound on her inner thigh. Spying them from the other room, Eve mistakes their interaction as a sign of sexual attraction, which she jealously reports to Angela. Later, Eve humiliates Wei with a threat and abandons her at a remote cliffside.

Paul steals Wei’s notebook and sends it to a friend for translation. Paul also makes his own trip to the botanical exhibit to examine the exotic corpse flower.

Wei returns home to find that Angela, acting out of her own jealously as well as wanting revenge for Eve, destroyed Wei’s memorial for her father. Wei warns that their ancestors will now curse them as a physical fight ensues. During their struggle, Wei defensively stabs Angela in her eye and she dies.

Vowing to bring her cousin back, Wei carves off Angela’s face and uses her skin graft formula to seamlessly replace her own face. After stashing the dead body underneath a bed, Wei begins impersonating Angela by first fooling her aunt.

At school, Wei is distressed to discover she is expected to play a sport as Angela. Wei intentionally breaks her finger to get out of the activity.

During a date with Angela’s boyfriend Josh, Angela’s face unexpectedly falls off Wei. Josh backs away in fright and accidentally drops off a cliff to his death.

Realizing Paul stole her notebook, Wei demands he return it. Claiming ownership of the research, Paul refuses.

Envious of Eve’s beauty, Wei kills her with a power drill and begins wearing her face. As Eve, Wei tries seducing Paul to learn what he did with her research, and has an awkward encounter with Aunty Ling’s nosy neighbor Sheryl while disposing of Angela’s dismembered body, portions of which are eaten by Angela’s dog Bikke. Wei is also briefly questioned by two policemen looking to speak to Angela about Josh’s disappearance.

Wei notifies Student Affairs about Paul having an inappropriate relationship with a female student. Paul is forced to quit teaching, but he continues his own skin graft research based on Wei’s translated notes. After Paul recreates a vial of the formula, Wei steals it by continuing to pose as Eve.

Wei returns to her own face. Angela’s other friend Jasmine, who previously had a change of heart and had been encouraging Wei to be more self-confident, comes to the house. Afraid of her finding out everything that’s been going on after she discovers Eve’s severed head among body parts stored in the refrigerator, Wei suffocates Jasmine to death with Saran wrap.

Paul comes to house to confront Wei over the stolen vial. After capturing and restraining him, Wei bonds the living tissue to Paul’s face to physically torture him while she proclaims she will live a beautiful life where everyone will love her. Nosy neighbor Sheryl interrupts, forcing Wei to flee the house with the police in pursuit.

In a subway, Wei hides beneath a blanket with her homeless friend John. However, Wei spills the skin graft formula, which causes Wei and John to fuse into one grotesque mutant that continues living on the street while Wei is presumed missing and wanted for questioning in three gruesome deaths as well as Paul’s mutilation.

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Review:

When she was a child, Wei watched her scientist father tirelessly toil to develop a skin graft formula that could cure them both of a rash-like facial deformity. Wei also witnessed the experiment’s horrifying failure, as the living tissue he created spread across her father’s face until he suffocated, despite his daughter furiously slashing at him with a scalpel.

Now a college student dedicated to completing her father’s research, Wei is on her way to New Zealand to attend university on a science scholarship. Wei’s mum is anxious to get the girl out of China, where her appearance makes her “a monster.” Living with her materialistic aunt and socialite cousin Angela, Wei doesn’t fare any better at making friends. Angela and her gossipy gal pals shun Wei for being unsightly, and for having unfamiliar customs with cultural cuisine they consider gross.

When she’s not having her self-esteem shredded, Wei spends time in a lab where her biochemistry professor suspiciously licks his lips over the project she’s passionately working on. After uncovering the missing link in her father’s formula, Wei finally finds a way to fix her face. But she’s going to do more than that. She’s going to take on other faces entirely as a domino line falls that has Wei butchering bodies and pretending to be other people, all in the name of being seen as the beauty she has always wanted to be.

Whether the film likes it or not, and it probably does not, director Sasha Rainbow’s “Grafted” invites obvious comparisons to Coralie Fargeat’s “The Substance” (review here). Both tell stories of appearance-absorbed people assuming alternate personalities preferred over their own. Both bite on social commentary about image obsession, with a specific emphasis on how imaginary ideals impact women. And although “Grafted” does it to a lesser extent, both are framed as frightening fairy tales rather than ripped-from-the-headlines realities.

Being a movie about appearances, “Grafted” intentionally uses appearances to identify people and their purposes without requiring much verbal background. Unintentionally, this technique telegraphs the plot’s path partly through the nature of how characters are presented visually.

Take Wei’s professor, Paul. From the first time we see his slick hair, tailored suit, and square jaw, everything about him suggests he’s too put together, too handsome to be an ordinary science slob. And even before we see him frustrated by the news his cancelled research is no longer being funded, his furrowed brow, sly smirk, and firm grab at Wei’s notebook announce Paul’s clear intention to steal the work as his own.

It comes as no surprise to learn Paul is secretly having sex with his student Eve, Angela’s attractive friend who doesn’t take kindly to competition for the older man’s affections. With her blonde ponytail tied back tightly, a pink collar folded over a midriff-baring sweater, and arms often folded at her chest, everything about Eve sends signals of her being prissy, pouty, and posh.

Dressing everyone like this fits “Grafted’s” design as a fable-like metaphor for the desperate difficulties of finding acceptance by pretending to be someone you’re not. Amid the lowkey quirks of this weird world, which can occasionally tease too much silliness such as whenever a nosy neighbor distractingly shakes up the tone, Wei rolls a runaway snowball into an avalanche of body parts whose increasingly complicated consequences would make William Gaines and Al Feldstein proud. During this time, performers playing two roles do convincing work selling themselves as Wei awkwardly imitating them while wearing their faces. Acting eclipses bits of body horror, which are in shorter supply than some might expect, and not always as skin-flinchingly gruesome as perhaps they should be to reflect everyone’s repulsions.

I can’t help but think Wei’s motivation might make more sense if her insecurity was caused by a truly revolting disfigurement rather than a regrettably located birthmark. Maybe I’m missing part of the point. Maybe the movie means to illustrate how minor blemishes can be pettily perceived as major offenses. But other women treat Wei like she’s Medusa, and you might turn to stone if you can stomach looking at her, when the reality is the discoloration on one side of her jaw isn’t that big of a deal.

Not going far enough rocks the film’s rhythm. “Grafted” flattens out at its ending because a muddled moral leaves it with nowhere unique to go. Should the takeaway be that vanity is bad? Is it as simple as don’t kill people? And who’s learning the lesson, Wei or the victims who morphed her from an imaginary monster into an actual one?

Far from being the film’s fault for releasing only a few months later, it’s unfortunate “Grafted” trails in “The Substance’s” shadow because it’s difficult to divorce the unfair association of it being a lower-budgeted take on topics that were satirically sharper as well as more splattery in its Oscar-nominated big sister. That’s meant more as praise for “The Substance,” not as a dismissively derisive assessment of “Grafted.” “Grafted’s” talented cast and creative crew craft a noteworthy debut for Sasha Rainbow’s first feature. Fingers are crossed Rainbow’s next effort doesn’t have the problem of parallel thinking so it can stand taller on its own two feet.

Review Score: 70

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