GRAFTED (2024)

Streaming on Shudder!
Directed by Sasha Rainbow.
Written by Sasha Rainbow, Lee Murray, Mia Maramara, Hweiling Ow.
Check out the trailer here!!

A young, brilliant, and socially awkward exchange student named Wei (Joyena Sun) leaves her home in China to live with her Aunt Ling (Xiao Hu) and Cousin Angela (Jess Hong) in New Zealand. While her professor Paul (Jared Turner) is impressed with Wei’s scientific know-how and agrees to take her as his assistant, Wei fails to fit in with Angela and her friends Eve (Eden Hart) and Jasmine (Sepi To’a). You see, Wei and her father were burned back in China and her father was developing a skin graft technique to regrow damaged skin, but after her father’s experiment ended in his death, Wei sets out to perfect his theories. Taking notice of Wei’s talent in the lab, Paul, who is up for tenure and without ideas of his own, intends to steal Wei’s new skin graft formula and take credit for it himself. But Wei decides to use the formula on herself, resulting in a series of events that spell disaster for all involved.

GRAFTED strongly resembles last year’s amazing THE SUBSTANCE in many ways. While it is not as creative as that marvelous film, it does toy around with a lot of the same concepts including the obsession to look good in today’s society, the basic need to fit in and be relevant to others, and how messing with the natural order of things often comes back to haunt you big time. All of this occurs in GRAFTED as Wei tries her hardest to befriend her cousin’s clique. Mixing in elements of MEAN GIRLS and HEATHERS, Angela and her friends are not the friendliest, as Wei represents aspects of Angela’s culture that she doesn’t want to acknowledge. The bullying that goes on against Wei is going to pull on the heartstrings and it really succeeds in making one root for Wei to be better than trying to be like these mean girls. But if she did that, this wouldn’t be a horror movie, would it?

What transpires is a bit of body swapping as Wei’s new skin grafting technique turns out to be temporary and requires new skin to keep working, making Wei a sort of vampire of sorts, in need new faces to help her heal her own. This leads to some very heinous body horror as skin is ripped off, scraped off, clawed off, and shaved off in all kinds of toe-curling ways. These scenes get up close and personal and will definitely be too much for the weak stomached. Still, the effects look good and practical, and much blood is spilled, so gorehounds will be appeased.

Logic sort of gets tossed out the window by the third act as Wei begins impersonating the people who she kills. It’s quite a leap that people in the film are actually fooled by Wei simply wearing the faces of these other actresses, mainly because they have completely different body types than the short statured Wei. I get it. We are supposed to suspend that kind of disbelief, but Wei gets into intimate situations with people who know the skin Wei is wearing and one has to believe the cast is dumb as a rock for not noticing something is off.

The cast is pretty solid all around. This is a film where not only do the actors have to play different characters, but they also have to play Wei wearing their skins. For the most part this is successful, though I think there was an opportunity missed to have some kind of physical quirks could have been added to Wei’s performance and then reflected later when the other actors are playing Wei. Instead, we are to believe Wei is such a chameleon that she is able to imitate these other characters without others noticing and there really is nothing we know of Wei to indicate this. There is a scene where Wei attempts to mimic the way Angela and her friends are talking, but it is less than believable and only shows that she is no Rich Little, in terms of impersonation.

While again, it was very similar to the end of THE SUBSTANCE, I liked the way GRAFTED wrapped up in a tragedy-heavy way. It is different enough from THE SUBSTANCE to not be a complete rip-off, most likely these two films were in production at the same time, but still the dark and grotesque tone is very similar. GRAFTED has some very grody gore and sports some solid acting from its entire cast. There is a poeticism to the way this one plays out that I dug quite a bit. I feel it is an inferior film when compared with all of the heavy thematics THE SUBSTANCE tackled, but the similarities guarantee it would make for a thrilling, albeit gross double feature. GRAFTED plays on a lower scale, mixing MEAN GIRLS with the goppiest of body horror. I definitely recommend this one, but only if you have a strong stomach.

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Music Written by Tim Heidecker
Music & Arrangement by Bonnie ‘Prince’ Billy https://youtu.be/PDySbxQgZMg
(I do not own this music)