GRAFTED - Mark Reviews Movies

Grafted, Shudder

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Review by Mark Dujsik | January 23, 2025

There's the way a person perceives oneself, and then, there's the way other people perceive you. Grafted is best viewed, perhaps, as a story about the way its main character believes other people see her. It almost has to be that way, because the story doesn't make much sense otherwise.

Wei (Joyena Sun) is that protagonist, who grew up in China with her scientist father (played by Sam Wang) until his untimely death and moves to New Zealand to attend college in order to follow in her father's footsteps. The father dies, by the way, in a prologue revolving around his experimental procedure—a new type of skin graft. Both he and Wei have birthmarks on their face, and dad wants to be able to cover up his own and his daughter's. His first real test of the process goes well enough, until it goes far too well and causes the added skin to cover up his entire face—including his eyes, nostrils, and mouth.

Here's the thing about Wei and her birthmark. She thinks a lot about it, apparently, and believes it's the one thing that has prevented her from having a "normal" life. In reality, the mark is barely noticeable, especially since Wei keeps her hair long and covering the side of the jaw where the birthmark is. Apart from a single moment in which her aunt Ling (Xiao Hu) mentions that she has some concealing cream that might help hide the mark, no one else says much, if anything, about Wei's face, either. Her peers find other things about the new young woman in Auckland to find much odder than that.

What is co-writer/director Sahsa Rainbow's movie really about, then? Well, it has to be about Wei's own fears of being seen as different because of how she looks, while missing the fact that her worries make her behave in a way that other people find different and off-putting. Maybe Wei's cousin Angela (Jess Hong) and her best friends do notice the birthmark, don't say anything about it, and use that as an excuse to ostracize her. Then again, maybe the team of screenwriters here (Lee Murry, Mia Maramara, and Hweiling Ow joining the director) are less interested in these characters and more intrigued by how Wei's inherited experiment can be used for a horror-based and inherently unbelievable thriller.

Obviously, Wei decides to continue her father's research and work on his skin grafting process. This comes after Angela and the cousin's two friends, Eve (Eden Hart) and Jasmine (Sepi To'a), ignore Wei for a while and, after feeling guilty when they realize how lonely and sad she is about her father's death, go to a Chinese restaurant with her out of pity. The pity doesn't last long (although Jasmine does relate to Wei and starts a secret friendship with her), and soon enough, Wei has plenty of free time to work in the college's science lab on her father's procedure. She's "helped" by her professor Paul (Jared Turner), who is having an affair with Eve and eventually sees an opportunity to get some grant money if Wei's experiment works.

It does and, again, does too well, albeit in a different way than the father's fatal results. With a single act of unintentionally extreme violence, the story shifts gears from a study of isolation—probably for the best, since the characters are overwhelmed by the central gimmick and plenty of melodrama—to a thriller about swapped identities. Basically, Wei gets to pretend to be someone else—someone as liked and popular and pretty as she has wanted to be—and also must pretend to be someone else, lest people start to wonder what happened to that other person.

None of this makes much sense, to be sure, especially when Wei has to juggle more missing people and an entirely different identity because her little scheme is so unlikely and completely unmanageable. As the movie's complications rise, though, its plot-based ambitions and demented comedy escalate along with them. Sure, the logistics of Wei's various disguises seem to fail at the most inopportune moments (A deteriorating facial "seam" appears several times) and succeed in spite of some very obvious differences between her and the people she's pretending to be (Rainbow gives Wei a physical feature, for example, that can't be hidden, but conveniently, no one seems to notice). Still, the over-the-top gore and wicked sense of humor accompanying the game help to put it in a particular context.

Ultimately, though, Grafted does feel like a shallow game about variously shallow people—including our protagonist, presumably—getting their comeuppance. On a narrative level, the movie is filled with logical leaps, and thematically, it's inconsistent to the point that it's tough to tell if even the obvious core idea—the price of seeking superficial validation—is relevant to the story. The horror and comedy don't go far enough to cover up such shortcomings.

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