A Biochemist Runs Amok in New Zealand Director Sasha Rainbow's Debut Grafted

GRAFTED 

(Sasha Rainbow, 2025, New Zealand, 96 minutes) 

When it comes to body horror, David Cronenberg has long been the king, but since the 2000s, more female filmmakers have been entering the fray, most notably Julia Ducournau (Raw and Cannes Palme d'Or winner Titane) and Coralie Fargeat (Cannes best screenplay winner The Substance). 

Not all female-made films have garnered as much acclaim, but the higher profile of these award-winners--including a Golden Globe for The Substance star Demi Moore--has expanded the audience for the kinds of squishy, squirm-inducing concepts once relegated to drive-ins and grindhouses. 

It doesn't come as a surprise to see women coming at the subgenre from different angles than their male predecessors, particularly in terms of the way society judges women's looks, the way women judge their own looks, and the more extreme methods some women use to make improvements. (That said, the transformation of the late socialite Jocelyn Wildenstein's face from what it was to what it became played out like real-time horror to me.)

Many of these films use Mary Shelley's Frankenstein--love that a 21-year-old woman created the template for today's body horror over 200 years ago--as a jumping-off point as an antihero puts more faith in science than they should to make things "right," as they see it. To use dead or donor tissue, for instance, to recreate that which has been lost or to prettify perceived imperfections. For what it's worth, my oral surgeon used donor tissue when I had a gum graft several years ago, so I'm a recipient, and I'm grateful.

BAFTA award-winning New Zealand-American filmmaker Sasha Rainbow's antihero is a Chinese biochemistry student with a genetic facial scar. Unlike Moore's 50-year-old Elisabeth Sparkle in The Substance, she isn't concerned with the restoration of youth, since she already has youth on her side, but with the eradication of a flaw. 

In the prologue, the young girl (played by Mohan Liu) looks to her biochemist father for hope, since he has a scar, too, but his attempt at a scar-erasing skin graft goes awry in a sequence that isn't especially believable, though it's plenty horrifying (there's no mention of a mother). 

When Rainbow catches up with Wei (Joyena Sun) as a 21-year-old, she's picked up where her father left off by attempting to perfect a skin graft that will solve her problem--but without creating more--though because of the reddish scar's placement, she can conceal it with her hair or ever-present scarf, so it isn't as noticeable. On her father, it was impossible to miss. 

When Wei gets the chance to study in New Zealand, she takes it, since she hasn't had an easy time of it in China. 

In Tāmaki Makaurau, aka Aucklund, she stays with her Aunty Ling (Xiao Hu, Taika Waititi's upcoming Klara and the Sun) and her college-age daughter, Angela (3 Body Problem's Jess Hong), in their palatial, if unfinished Remuera manor. The former is a bitter, if well meaning divorcée who sells beauty products--an underexplored angle--while the latter is flashy and outgoing in all the ways Wei is understated and withdrawn.

Angela considers Wei an imposition, not least because she embodies a culture--her mother's culture--she finds off-putting. Though we're meant to sympathize with Wei, there's something odd about her, not because of her culture, but because she eats noisily, peeks through keyholes, and ignores social cues. If Angela and her bottle-blonde friend, Eve (Sweet Tooth's Eden Hart), can be bitchy, Wei mistakes their fake smiles for something real. 

In the meantime, she befriends John (Evil Dead Rise's Mark Mitchinson), a scarred vagrant who hangs around the university in an out-of-the-way area. Wei says she wants to help people like them, but he ensures her that she's "already beautiful." She finds another advocate in the biochemistry professor (Jared Turner, another Sweet Tooth actor) who oversees her lab work, not simply because she's a brilliant student, but because he sees her grafting research as an opportunity to secure funding--at her expense. 

If Wei is able to build on her father's unfinished work, she makes the foolhardy decision to experiment on herself--precisely what got him in deadly trouble--and when someone in her orbit suffers a grievous facial injury, she experiments on them, too. As in John Woo's Face/Off, an unexpected inspiration, the grafts heal super-fast. Wei removes an upper layer of skin, applies one of her plant-powered grafts, and within seconds, it heals and blends right in. At first. It wouldn't be a body horror film if there wasn't some kind of a catch. 

It all leads to a situation I didn't see coming and won't spoil, other than to say that the film splits in two--and then three--akin to Adam Schimberg's A Different Man with Adam Pearson and Sebastian Stan as Before and After, a film also involving facial disfigurement and a miracle cure, except without the horror. In both cases, though, science can't fix a person's psyche. 

And Wei's psyche, which was never all that secure to begin with, completely unravels in ways that are never boring, but the further Grafted strays from reality, the less effective it becomes, despite the more serious cultural and sociological elements at play. For what it's worth, though, Wei never completely rejects her cultural heritage--Rainbow wrote the film with horror fiction writer Lee Murray and Filipina filmmaker Mia Maramara, who adapted it from an idea provided by Malaysian producer Hweiling Ow.

In the end, the film's moral is exactly what I expected it to be: 1) don't risk your life to fix a physical imperfection, and 2) don't risk the lives of others in the process. None of this is as affecting or as humorous as I would have hoped, but the entire human (and animal) cast is up to the task, and I can't say I wasn't entertained--there's also a fun reveal during the end credits.

One way or the other: I'm curious to see what Sasha Rainbow does next.

Grafted premieres in the US on Shudder on Fri, Jan 24. Fun fact: Jess Hong and Jared Turner have both appeared on Kiwi detective series The Brokenwood Mysteries. Last year, I streamed the first four seasons via Cascade PBS (my employer). Images from Vilcek Foundation, NZ Herald, and YouTube via Sasha Rainbow/Mister Smith Entertainment (poster image and Joyena Sun as Wei) and MeisterDrucke (Frankenstein book cover).