Erik Adams
Grafted is now streaming on Shudder.
In the wake of The Substance and A Different Man, it’s safe to say that self-hatred is currently having a moment in genre movies. The internalized contempt for who and what we are, whether it stems from some perceived deficit in looks, personality, or class status, has festered into a full-on Cronenbergian sideshow – bad news for the soul but great fodder for directors like Coralie Fargeat, Aaron Schimberg, and newcomer Sasha Rainbow. Rainbow’s feature debut, Grafted, spews the frothy pink byproduct of a big year for body horror in the direction of Jawbreaker and Mean Girls’ queen bees and wannabes – and the results aren’t half-bad. Rainbow’s screenplay, co-written with Hweiling Ow, Mia Maramara, and Lee Murray, grapples with themes as tricky as The Substance’s, and it’s almost as brazen about confronting them. With this measured mean streak in mind, she initially takes a sympathetic approach that provides a safe space for her murderous lead – until that’s no longer possible, at which point the kid gloves go flying and the blood really begins to spill.
Grafted follows Wei (Joyena Sun), a Chinese-born scientist who moves to Auckland on scholarship and suffers a culture shock when she’s tossed into the shallow end of university social life. At least she keeps her grades up, piquing the interest of Paul (Jared Turner), a laboratory wunderkind-turned-shitheel lecturer who spots an opportunity for collaboration/exploitation in Wei’s unorthodox work with skin grafts. From there, Grafted doesn’t skimp on the gore: As Wei’s research – which she sees as both a tribute to her late father and a way to cover up some hated birthmarks – turns her peers into unwitting donors, her surgical implements become more diverse. What begins with scalpels moves on to fingertips and, in the movie’s wildest kill sequence, an electric drill. Her cutting, digging, and searching for that which should not be sought brings the sound effects to the fore. Flesh – be it from people or the strange flower that provides the pink, transformative elixir crucial to her bizarre methods – is sliced, tugged at, and separated to a soundtrack of oozing, nauseating squishes.
Rainbow doesn’t flinch with her close-ups, either, zeroing in on Wei applying lipstick (seemingly for the first time), mindlessly devouring chicken, and observing the lives of her cousin Angela (Jess Hong) and her besties with an odd mix of contempt and yearning on her face. Sun is remarkably good at all of this. These moments cut to the heart of Wei’s alienating tension between who she is and who she’d rather be.
The power imbalance between Paul and Wei is a great source of tension, especially when Turner plays him with such smug entitlement: He hisses at her when he thinks nobody’s watching, takes liberties with her personal property, and secretly knocks boots with a student – a fact Wei later uses to her advantage in disturbing fashion. But the racial dynamic underpinning their relationship – Paul, the white authority figure abusing his position, and Wei, his timid Chinese subordinate – while obvious, is blunted to spare viewers any unpleasantness that doesn’t involve the forcible removal of skin.
It’s a recurring issue with Grafted: At first, Wei’s cultural assimilation seems like the film’s primary concern, and there’s some exploration of it by contrast to Angela, who sneers at Wei’s traditions and refuses to learn a single word of Chinese. These hostilities are fiercely performed but underwritten. Before we can even get a handle on who Wei and Angela are to themselves and to each other, the early catastrophe that enables Wei’s deranged experiments shifts our perception of the cousins. Wei is eager to annihilate her personal (and, later, her racial) identity to fit in where she’s otherwise felt alienated, but any of the riskier implications of her choices are treated as window dressing. Instead, the film gleefully zeroes in on her less gnarly physical metamorphosis, in which Wei uses other people’s skin to get revenge on those who wronged her – and, one presumes, live her best life.
While the screenplay could have used some of Wei’s pink goo to more neatly fuse its patchwork of ideas together, Grafted still manages to be an entertaining, mindful, gore-saturated charge through social hell. Like any decent body-horror parable, it has the good sense to let its characters flail around in their biological and psychological viscera, failing to find peace or even satisfaction in this cruel modern era. We watch, and we ask: How much of ourselves do we change to feel accepted? What parts of our identity are now unrecognizable, or gone? Were these changes worth it? Grafted may raise more questions than it’s prepared to answer, but its observations on superficiality cut to the bone.
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