‘Grafted’ Has a Horror Scene Even Grosser Than ‘The Substance’

In Karyn Kusama’s 2009 high school horror comedy Jennifer’s Body, Hell is a teenage girl. In New Zealand director Sasha Rainbow’s debut feature, Grafted, a teenage girl is more like The Labyrinth from Clive Barker’s Hellraiser series, a warped, macabre dimension of gruesome torment and unwholesome delights.

The girl in Grafted is Wei (Joyena Sun), removed from her home in Anytown, China, to New Zealand, where she moves in with her blithely preoccupied auntie, Ling (Xiao Ho), and her snotty, hip cousin Angela (Jess Hong). To the assimilated Angela, Wei is anomalous; she prays at her late father’s Buddhist altar, and favors Cantonese dishes like chicken feet and char siu, signifiers of national identity that calcify Angela’s impression of her as a weirdo and worse, a foreigner.

If Wei’s brazen Chineseness affronts Angela and her squad, Eve (Eden Hart) and Jasmine (Sepi To’a), her scientific inclination puts them off. In Grafted’s opener, young Wei (Mohan Liu) shares a dingy apartment with her dad, Liu (Sam Wang). They have a common love of science and similar birthmarks on their faces, which Liu intends to wipe away through his experiments in skin transplantation; they work too well, and he perishes in a shocking accident. Habitually encumbered with a chunky scarf to hide her birthmark in the film’s present tense, Wei finishes his work, but again: Too well.

There’s a neat trick pulled off in Grafted, besides the makeup effects team’s extraordinary effort in creating well-realized facial mutilations; Rainbow, over time, expands Wei’s portrayal to include co-star Hong and Hart alongside Sun. The movie establishes that Wei means to cure what she considers her deformity, and that her “deformity” is framed so only by social beauty standards and mores. But Wei’s conflict with Angela comes to a fast boil, and simply covering up the birthmark will not suffice. Wei wants to cover up Wei.

A scuffle between her and Angela ends with a chopstick jammed in the latter’s eye, and Wei, gifted with fresh fodder for research, takes the bold step of slicing off her mug, as well as her kin’s, with a scalpel, in a sequence as memorable for gnarly imagery as sound design to squinch ear canals. Maybe one day, Shudder will run a behind the scenes bit explaining how Rainbow’s crew arranged Grafted’s bowel-clenching aural sensations for this sequence. Is the secret a sheet of plastic wrap slathered in K-Y? Sopping pizza dough squeezing through grasped fingers? Whatever it is, it’s f---ing disgusting, and it works.

It’s a gross-out joy to see folks lose their lineaments in splatterfests, assuming you’re the type who can reasonably feel “joy” at simulated overkill. Grafted centers Angela in this scene as if to numb viewers to the sight of Wei’s impromptu postmortem cosmetic surgery, leaving them vulnerable to the sound of the procedure—and, ultimately, to the movie’s graduation from its face-swap conceit to a body-swap conceit. Wei succeeds where her dad couldn’t: She adopts Angela’s face as her own. Eureka! But forethought isn’t her strong suit; she has no plan for what happens next, as Ling arrives home unexpectedly and Wei has to pass herself off as Angela.

Because Grafted does such strong work rooting us in the its horror’s visceral, revolting side, those visual and aural hallmarks—droplets of blood splashed across Hong’s face like a forming daguerreotype, the squelching heard as Sun peels the prosthetic away—echo when Wei is on screen, which pretty much is “always.” Think of their dynamic as a grisly relay race: Sun passes the baton off to Hong, who then plays Wei like a stoned baby giraffe, gawky, awkward, unfamiliar with her skin; when Eve discovers Wei’s slasher impulses, Hong hands the baton to Hart, who coltishly follows suit.

These sequential transformations add a thin but resilient layer of black comedy to Grafted’s body horror. Wei finally gets what she’s come to wish for, to be pop-u-lar, and she finds she has no idea how: How to fake in-crowd confidence, to stand cool, to walk cool, to look at other people cool, much less talk cool. It’s an existential punishment straight out of the Tales from the Crypt playbook, where uppance often comes through spiritual fulfillment.

It’s a certainty that a handful of Grafted’s reviews will draw on The Substance for an easily within reach reference. Qualify the movie that way if you like. But the tactical application of gore Rainbow and her crew make here accomplishes something remarkable: facilitation of the leads’ deft three-pronged performance, a proof demonstrating how style is substance. In Grafted, character doesn’t come before carnage. In fact, it’s in the carnage where the film’s characters are revealed.