Grafted, 2024.
Directed by Sasha Rainbow.
Starring Joyena Sun, Jess Hong, Eden Hart, Jared Turner, Sepi To’a and Xiao Hu.
SYNOPSIS:
A shy Chinese student wins a scholarship to study at a prestigious New Zealand university. Desperate to fit in and win new friends, she experiments with biomedics and skin grafting in order to change her life.
Body Horror certainly had a good year in 2024. This was largely thanks to the sheer force and quality of Coralie Fargeat’s The Substance. Demi Moore’s recent Golden Globes win shows that the film’s squelchy run will continue. This is good news for other purveyors of Cronenbergian gloop, including the makers of the new horror movie Grafted.
Focusing on the perils of literally trying to shape how others see and perceive you, the movie has plenty of bright ideas but sadly loses a little focus on how to deliver them. It’s a lot of fun for sure, but the higher end of actually making a point about the surface consumerist 21st Century world gets somewhat muddled.
The story looks at three central characters, nervous smart student Wei (Joyena Sun), her confident cousin Angela (Jess Hong), and the popular Eve (Eden Hart). The difficulty of starting a new life in a new culture and country is given a nod with Wei and her cousin having completely different backgrounds. Angela is New Zealand-born, and the differences in the cousins’ experiences is an intriguing angle that could have been made more of.
The third character, Eve, serves as a classic mean girl/aspirational figure for Wei. It is her that she wants to look like. So how does she get there? Well, Wei is a gifted scientist who learned much from her deceased father, who we are introduced to in a creepy intro sequence.
By utilizing the school’s lab equipment with the backing of her odious professor – who happens to be having an affair with Eve, and also recognises Wei’s intellectual brilliance – she forges the ideal way to take on a new identity. When the prof starts to put Wei’s research across as his own, she becomes even more incensed and unstable. The path should then be taken for an explosive trip to Weirdsville, except it well, doesn’t really.
Horror comedy is a notoriously difficult genre. There are so many different approaches to tackle, and if one comes unstuck it can throw the whole thing off. With this, it’s that Wei’s story gets side-tracked by bluster and bombast. The character could have been a revenge hero, but becomes more of a sad tragedy.
But, perhaps, the filmmakers are saying, in the world of big market cosmetic enterprise, aren’t we all losers? Well, yeah, but the film could have made this point in a far more focused and direct way, and have the hero taking on the worst excesses of capitalism rather than just accepting it as an immovable object.
That being said, Grafted is an old-school horror laugh for those after a dose of colourful knockabout bloody fun.
Grafted streams on Shudder from January 24th.
Flickering Myth Rating – Film: ★ ★ / Movie: ★ ★ ★
Robert W Monk
