Squelchy New Zealand Horror Grafted Wears an Array of Bloody Faces

Grafted, the new sci-fi/body horror/psychedelic cosmetic freakout from first-time feature director Sasha Rainbow, is a film that breathlessly races between myriad ideas one might find as the full-on basis of another horror movie. Debuting this week on Shudder, the film simply wants to be so many things at once. Assimilation parable. Cosmetic and beauty standards satire. Mean Girls-esque college clique revenge story. The Substance-esque body melter. All that and more, in the space of a 90-minute runtime. It should likely come as no surprise, then, that Grafted occasionally overextends itself as it reaches for unclear symbolism or profundity. But as is so often the case with debuts, a surfeit of ideas and ambition is still quite preferable to the absence of them. This is a confidently directed and visualized debut with a strong central performance, albeit one not fully supported by its screenplay. Not that you’re likely to note this in the moment, once all the face-slicing starts.

Grafted revolves around Wei (a mousy, apprehensive Joyena Sun), a brilliant biochemistry student who as a child witnesses the gruesome death of her father in the film’s opening moments, as he engages in that most hallowed of sci-fi horror traditions: Conducting radical experimentation on one’s own flesh, with disastrous results. All of Wei’s lineage, we are told, have historically always been cursed by facial deformity–in Wei’s case it’s a long, burn-like birthmark near the bottom of the side of her face, which she goes out of her way to hide whenever possible behind extended collars and voluminous scarves. It was her father’s obsession to pioneer new, rapidly effective skin-grafting techniques that might be used to permanently cure or obscure these marks. And following his genuinely unsettling demise–accompanied by some of the wettest and squelchiest foley and sound design I’ve heard in a horror film in recent memory–that burden has now been transferred to Wei, who is accepted as a scholarship student at a New Zealand university, where she moves in with her estranged aunt and the cousin she’s never met.

These earlier sequences endear us to Wei in a simple, natural manner–she’s a fish out of water, having come from the Chinese mainland, blessed at least to be proficient enough in English that she can get along in a new society that is entirely foreign to her. She represents an interesting personal duality, her pursuits being all rooted in hard science, while she simultaneously maintains an earnest religious (or folk faith) belief in at least some form of afterlife, as represented by a shrine to her father, to which she gives regular offerings. It implies a certain faith in the world beyond, or belief in the capacity of family members beyond the grave to intercede on your behalf, but these threads are just one of many that Grafted never really follows to a completed thought. Her workaholic Aunty Ling (Xiao Hu) and cruel, popular cousin Angela (Jess Hong), on the other hand, represent the abandonment of traditional values in the interest of upward social mobility–Angela in particular is only one generation removed from China, but has completely abandoned any pretense of interest in her family’s origins or culture, instead surrounding herself with other socially powerful, affluent girls. She’s not thrilled, having a gawky Chinese expat cousin land on her doorstep.

These circumstances position Wei as quite a different sort of protagonist to the likes of Elisabeth Sparkle in The Substance, a film to which Grafted can barely avoid being compared given some of the superficial similarities. Whereas Elisabeth is a woman who refuses to let go of her persona and clings to relevance by embracing the bleeding edge of medical research in order to preserve her position in society, Wei is initially acting out of a much more sympathetic desire for simple acceptance–she wants to be able to pass for “normal” in the world, without people gawking at her or being made to feel like a total outsider. Like Elisabeth, though, there are tragic overtones to her character–if she had been embraced by her new peers in New Zealand rather than shunned, perhaps she could have come to terms with her insecurities or even accept that which makes her different. Because this is a revenge-minded horror flick, though, you just know they’re going to drive the poor gal over the edge and into stabby territory.

And it’s when Grafted enters this manic phase, fueled by mad science, face-swapping and identity impersonation, that it both impresses with its style but wears somewhat thin on substance and characterization. Because rest assured, the film looks good–great at times, even–being energetically shot and refreshingly colorful, with a palette dappled in shades such as mint green and pastel pink. There are some exceedingly gross FX as we embrace body horror motifs, along with montages stringing together elements such as squelchy tissue work in the lab with sequences of restaurant mastication, infidelities, syringes and various fluids spurting. It’s an effectively gooey presentation. So too does the identity-swapping hook allow some of the cast to flex their muscles, particularly in the form of actress Eden Hart’s unhinged disconnect from reality as her character Eve barely manages to maintain the facade of her true identity.

The screenplay’s character progression, though, can’t quite keep up with the increasingly demented energy committed to the screen. A story like this, in which our protagonist is consistently taken advantage of and abused by those around her, must eventually guide that character toward a moment where they break bad, but here it arrives in a way that feels rather arbitrary, a chance happenstance rather than the true culmination of a psyche that has been pushed to the breaking point. An accident occurs, a chopstick or two ends up inserted into parts of the body where chopsticks decidedly aren’t meant to go, and Wei emerges seemingly transformed and committed to vengeance with such zeal and suddenness that it’s difficult for the audience to buy the rapidity of her seeming acceptance of the new status quo. Has she instantly become crazed and monstrous, reborn as a Takashi Miike character, or was this always her secret self? The behavior and lack of self-preservation she immediately starts exhibiting as she seeks vengeance on the mean girl clique and philandering professor who form her primary enemies list just doesn’t quite feel earned, and it’s difficult to say as things progress what exactly Wei’s endgame has become in her mind. To sacrifice her life for her father’s memory? To inflict as much agony as possible? To advance science in her own, twisted way? Her level of seeming insanity just feels a bit disproportionate to the events that set it off; the calculus doesn’t quite work out.

What we’re left with is a glistening, bloody mishmash of many clear influences, ranging from Face/Off, to Reanimator, to Audition, Heathers and beyond. With so many thoughts in its head and a modest runtime, Grafted simply can’t drape quite enough flesh on its characters to say everything it seemingly wants to say, but it more than manages to entertain all the same. Boasting nightmarish visuals and sound design that will both stay with the viewer for a long time to come, it’s a technical triumph and impressive directorial debut that hints at a talent who will hopefully round into form as a promising genre auteur in the years to come.

Director: Sasha Rainbow
Writers: Lee Murray, Sasha Rainbow, Mia Maramara
Stars: Joyena Sun, Eden Hart, Jess Hong, Jared Turner, Xiao Hu, Sepi To’a
Release date: Jan. 24, 2025 (Shudder)

Jim Vorel is Paste’s Movies editor and resident genre geek. You can follow him on Twitter or on Bluesky for more film writing.