‘Grafted’ Brooklyn Horror 2024 Review: Gore, Glorious Gore
Beauty standards, across every culture, are easily attainable and enrich our quality of life, emotional wellbeing, and relationships. Just kidding—beauty standards are insidious and make our lives hell. The topic of physical attractiveness comes with so much baggage and trauma that scores of academics have conducted extensive research and published papers about beauty standards and their connection to mental health, career success, and interpersonal relationships. Physical beauty isn’t everything. But it sure feels that way.
While some of us attempt to meet the ever-changing ideals of beauty through skincare regimens, makeup, and workout videos, many opt to go down the medical route (which is totally fine!). In Sasha Rainbow‘s new festival-sweeping debut feature Grafted, a young woman takes a DIY approach to a surgical glow-up with radical results.
Wei (Joyena Sun) is a gifted student with an affinity for biochemistry. She also has a visible skin difference on her face and neck inherited from her father, a scientist. Wei and her father had a close relationship, but when she was a child, she witnessed his untimely death. He had been working on a type of skin graft that would “fix” his and Wei’s facial differences, but an experiment on himself went terribly wrong.
Now a young adult, Wei travels from her home country of China to attend university in New Zealand. She moves in with her recently separated Aunty Ling (Xiao Hu) and cousin Angela (Jess Hong). Angela is beautiful, popular, and goes to the same school as Wei. She’s also mean and resentful of both Wei and her own mother. Nevertheless, Wei feels drawn to her. Shy, awkward, and self-conscious because of her skin, she desperately wants to fit in with Angela and her friends Eve (Eden Hart) and Jasmine (Sepi To’a). But they continuously rebuff her attempts at befriending them.
Meanwhile, Wei scores the coveted role of her professor Paul’s (Jared Turner) lab assistant. Using her late father’s notes, Wei commits to finishing his work and perfecting his revolutionary skin graft. Once she figures out the missing key ingredient, an extraction from the rare corpse flower, she’s successful! But her happiness doesn’t last long. A fight with Angela gets out of hand, leaving Wei frantic, scrambling, and careening down a gruesome, bloody path of no return. To make matters worse, Paul steals her notes, intending to take credit for her work.
Written by Rainbow, Lee Murray, Mia Maramara, and Hweiling Ow, Grafted is a shocking and powerful entry into the world of body horror. Each cast member delivered strong, memorable performances. Joyena Sun, in her first role in a feature film, is both sympathetic and terrifying as Wei. Co-stars Jess Hong, Eden Hart, and Sepi To’a are equally compelling and believable as Angela, Eve, and Jasmine, respectively. Jared Turner’s portrayal of the sleazy professor Paul is simultaneously entertaining and infuriating. Xiao Hu’s Aunty Ling is thoroughly enjoyable to watch.
In addition to excellent writing, Grafted showcases phenomenal art. While the entire film is visually stunning, prosthetics designed by Sean Bridle, makeup designed by Tracey Henton, and special effects by Casey Belsham and Dean Clarke stand out. All of the special and visual effects are perfectly captured by Tammy Williams’ cinematography.
While it may be easy to get caught up in the grotesquerie of Grafted, the film’s effectiveness is far from skin-deep. Grafted is a thoughtful exploration of the social capital of beauty. It also touches on the issues of identity and race. Throughout the film, Angela rejects her Chinese heritage. She doesn’t speak the language and she refuses to eat traditional food in public. She’s mortified whenever Wei interacts with her friends—her cousin is socially awkward, doesn’t fit conventional beauty standards, and worst of all, she’s unassimilated. Angela even desecrates the ancestor altar that her mother sets up for Wei, saying, “Why don’t you take your weird Chinese shit and go home?” We never see Angela’s father, but it’s implied that he’s not Chinese, which may add to her contentious relationship with her matrilineal heritage.
By contrast, Angela’s friend Jasmine, whose family is Tongan, is kind to Wei, empathizing with her struggle to fit in. White and blonde-haired Eve, on the other hand, is overtly xenophobic and racist.
Overall, Grafted is a multilayered and well-executed film with plenty of gross-out gore and edge-of-your-seat tension. Pair it with The Substance and Dans Ma Peau for a skin-crawling triple feature.
-
Grafted
Summary
‘Grafted’ is an expertly-crafted, gory, and thoughtful exploration of the social capital of beauty.
