Last Updated on January 29, 2025 by Angel Melanson
I am not a vegetarian but there have been times, like walking past the Greek butcher with skinned goats in the window or chomping into a particularly reddish turkey leg, when I’ve thought “this may be natural, but it’s also gross.”
That sense of revulsion from flesh is the star of Grafted, a new low budget body horror picture out of New Zealand. While the film doesn’t reinvent the wheel, and its “throw it all against the wall” approach to tone is considerably scattershot, director Sasha Rainbow, making her feature debut, executes several giddy gross-out moments, enough to make this a worthwhile couch stream.
Our story begins in China in one of those apartment complexes that makes “The Stacks” from Ready Player One look like an Andrew Wyeth painting. A young girl, Wei (Mohan Liu), lives in a cluttered dump that also doubles as a science lab with her caring (but, we’ll soon learn, mad and hubristic) father (Sam Wang). Both father and daughter have never-quite-explained purple splotches on their faces, which resemble the delta radiation burns suffered by Captain Christopher Pike on the original Star Trek series. (That a movie out in 2025 deploys an effect that calls to mind the makeup from a 1966 television show is, I’m going to assume, a deliberate choice.)
But Dad is cooking up some kind of cure. (He’s got petri dishes and scribble notebooks all over the place to prove it.) With his impressionable young child in the room he self-tests a supercharged skin graft that grows over the blemish on his face. Success? No! The experimental flesh is overzealous, and soon his mouth and nose are closed over. He grabs a scalpel to poke himself an air hole, but it’s no use! Wei, panicked, starts slicing and slashing to help him, but all we see is blood Blood BLOOD! Little Wei: go directly to therapy, do not pass Go.
When Wei does grow up (into actress Joyena Sun) she wins a scholarship to study in New Zealand. (Turns out she’s a biology whiz, like her old man.) She moves in with her gabby businesswoman Aunt Ling (Xiao Hu) and her snotty cousin Angela (Jess Hong.) It took me a minute to realize Anglea and Wei were supposed to be the same age because Angela looks significantly older.
Maybe this is meant to be symbolic of their psychological ages, but … it also just felt like weird casting. Also, when we first see Angela, she’s wearing trashy clothes, but it’s super unclear if she’s meant to be sexy and fashionable, or if this is a punchline. It’s indicative of the hard-to-pin-down vibe of the whole movie, where it’s unclear just how much of this is intended as satire.
Anyhow, Wei has a tough time fitting in at school. Angela and her two best Mean Girls pals, an Anya Taylor-Joy-ish gal named Eve (Eden Hart) and a more sympathetic young woman of Tongan descent, Jasmine (Sepi To’a), do a good job of alienating the newcomer from day one. Her professor, a walking red flag played to great scuzzy effect by Jared Turner, quickly recognizes her genius, and once he spies her notebooks (actually her father’s notebooks) he sees an on-ramp to fortune.
What’s annoying is that we never really know what this magical flesh-growing process actually is. A little bit of techno babble would have gone a long way. But we do get many close-ups of gross looking hunks of brisket that writhe around in the lab and are eventually shaved off the human body. Wei, doing her best to become friends with the three girls, invites them for a traditional yum cha of char siu, which is crispy, roasted cuts of pork that, given the context of the film, are particularly nasty. (I’m sure, however, it’s delicious.) The three are skeeved out, and Wei walks home all sad.
Eventually, things go awry, and that’s when the body count grows. Wei, needing to get herself out of a jam, has to carefully cut a face or two off and apply them over her own. This leads to some comedy (new flesh does not mean a new voice) and also moments of horror film triumph when these cosmetic adjustments begin to peel off. The bloody conclusion pays direct homage to Takashi Miike’s Audition and its most famous shot.
As with recent, terrific movies like The Substance and A Different Man, there is an underlying message here about how the pressure to pursue beauty can cause people to take, um, drastic measures. Grafted doesn’t really do anything with it other than to say “wow, would you look at this!” but it is still somewhat compelling. There’s also wasted potential in the underdevelopment of exploring the Chinese expat community in New Zealand. While the hard numbers of that group are small, it still represents about 5.5% of the population. This is, however, a very low budget movie, with few speaking parts and a limited number of locations.
Still, there are some smart flourishes. That Aunt Ling is also in the beauty supply biz (and her home face creams foreshadow future nauseating images) is a smart touch.
