Coming across like a little sister to Coralie Fargeat‘s maximalist body horror nightmare The Substance, Sasha Rainbow‘s debut Grafted is a solid fable about the lengths we go to fit in. It may stretch its themes a little thin, but there are buckets of blood and peeled flesh to go with a startling debut performance from Joyena Sun as a Chinese medical student determined to carry on her late father’s research at any cost.
We meet Wei as a young girl, marked with the same prominent facial birthmark as her dad (Sam Wang). He’s almost cracked the formula for modified skin grafts which would cover up their blemish, but it goes horribly wrong and he’s killed in gruesome fashion by his own creation. Years later Wei moves to Auckland, New Zealand to study. Painfully shy because of her blemish and her halting English, she moves in with her aunt Ling (Xiao Hu) and spiteful cousin (Jess Hong). Not only is she made to feel left out by her cousin and friends, but a scumbag professor Paul (Jared Turner) passes her research off as his own.
Grafted‘s first act is exemplary. Rainbow and fellow writers Lee Murray, Hweiling Ow, and Mia Maramara hook the attention early with its memorable opening, and then set up Wei’s situation smartly; her bewilderment at a new country and a hostile social and educational environment. Auntie Ling is all kindness and loves having a fellow Mandarin speaker in the house, but is often away on business. Ling’s fondness towards Mei only antagonises Angela further, as a monolingual English speaker who disdains the rituals that Wei maintains. Yet Angela and her clique of friends, Eve (Eden Hart) and Jasmine (Sepi To’a), aren’t cartoonishly evil antagonists. Jasmine in fact is surprisingly friendly and sympathetic towards Wei. As a Tongan, she sees some hint of a kindred spirit in this other young woman from a different culture, although she is quick to revert to type in company.
Once things begin to go awry for Wei the film starts to wobble, although it maintains an escalating sense of mischief and chaos. As you would expect this involves the improvement of her father’s research and before long she’s masquerading as others to cover up an increasing list of crimes. The gloopy, skin peeling effects are suitable nasty, with some excruciating closeups accompanied by squirm-inducing sound design. Sun’s performance is layered and fleet-footed, displaying both hermetic interiority and banshee hostility. Extra applause should also go to Jess Hong and Eden Hart who play not only their characters, but also Wei playing their characters.
Aptly, Grafted is a film that wears many faces. Its surgical sensibilities echo Face/Off, while Wei’s isolation and longing for acceptance turned murderous recalls Angela Bettis‘ sympathetic and heartbreaking performance in Lucky McKee‘s May. Unlike McKee’s classic, Rainbow doesn’t quite manage to maintain empathy for Wei. Her escalation into a murderous rampage is too sudden and terminal, digging up a lot of the earlier character foundations that the first act took such pains to lay down. More than its myriad influences (Mean Girls, Eyes Without a Face, Darkman) it comes to resemble another Oceanic effort, Sissy, which also sees insecurity and self-loathing explode outward with terrible repercussions.
Grafted undoubtedly has its blemishes: the birthmark on Wei’s face is barely mentioned by anyone else and is never used as a point of attack, rather blunting some of her motivation. It can also be argued that Wei is example of the long-standing trope of physical disfigurement being an outward indicator of inner evil, a perniciously retrograde cliche that’s been consistently subverted since at least 1932 with Freaks.
Yet there’s a devil may care swagger about Grafted that is easy to warm to, even as it jettisons theme and character in favour of spectacle by the third act. It is after all hard to maintain subtlety in a film where a character’s face literally falls onto their partner’s lap during foreplay. This is the punky, gleeful body horror of a Raimi rather than the more clinically psychological approach of a Cronenberg, and shows that beyond all else Sasha Rainbow certainly has an eye for a gory set piece.
Screening on Shudder from Fri 24 Jan 2025
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