Somewhere in a cramped apartment block in urban China, a little girl plays as her father works. She’s carefully drawing a corpse flower; she then feeds a live mouse to their pet snake; it’s all wholesome stuff. Her father, it seems, is a scientist who has tasked himself with ‘fixing’ the presumably hereditary skin condition suffered by himself and his daughter (which really doesn’t look significant enough to merit the treatment – applying a suspiciously squelchy skin graft to his face – but he’s his own man). It is, shall we say, in the experimental stages, and after a few seconds of hope, the skin graft runs wild, covering his nose and mouth.
We next meet Wei (Joyena Sun) in young adulthood. It seems her father’s head healing over didn’t dent her scientific zeal – but she’s also on the cusp of great things, more conventional things, such as a scholarship place at a New Zealand university. To attend, she’ll be relocating and staying with her Aunt Ling (Xiao Hu), a cosmetician, and Ling’s daughter – Wei’s rather glamorous cousin – Angela (Jess Hong). Wei is a clever, but sensitive young woman whose key priority is to honour her father’s memory by perfecting his skin-healing process. In the meantime, she’s very shy of her appearance, and compares herself nervously to her fully Kiwi cousin: Angela has always dodged learning Chinese and takes no interest in Chinese culture. She’d rather hang with her friends – serious Heathers/the Veronicas vibes – Eve (Eden Hart) and the slightly less awful Jasmine (Sepi To’a). Wei is something of an embarrassment to them, even when she tries really hard to fit in. Nonetheless, she’s off to a strong start academically, and volunteers for lab work to both boost her knowledge and to work alongside her lecturer, Professor Featherstone. Working alongside a power-hungry moral vacuum in human form, desperate to break through in the competitive world of experimental cosmetics? No problems anticipated here.
It feels very much like Grafted is electively setting itself up to be rather chaotic. It’s a very sensory film, particularly aurally, oozing and suppurating with the best of ’em. Alongside this, there’s the quick edits, the petri dishes, the macros, the flashbacks, the discordant soundtrack – it has a cumulatively quite overwhelming effect, but then it isn’t all glutinous grue, either. In places this is a very prettified film – a candy-coloured nightmare, with the pastel-shades of mean girl Eve and the hot pink of the chicken feet-averse Angela clashing interestingly with gloopy blood and rotten meat. As Wei’s great work (and her battles with Professor Featherstone) intensify the desperate measures she’s willing to take, and as the film gets progressively more gruesome and macabre, it never quite stops feeling candy-coloured, which works.
Final Girls Berlin are running Grafted as part of a double bill with its big cousin The Substance; it’s a decent choice, as the lineage is clear, and some of the processes (and repercussions) hit a similar note. Perhaps Grafted is The Substance from the other side of the age bracket, because this desperate, demented wish to fit in and be adored spans a very long period of time in a woman’s life. However, other films perhaps suggest themselves as even closer relatives. There’s something of May in here, at least at the start of the film, with a similarly isolated young woman desperate enough to body-snatch to break the spell of her own isolation. Then there feels like a direct line of descent between Grafted and lesser-known Japanese body horror Naked Blood: a scientist mother and father, a bizarre experimental programme and a desperation to honour one’s family by hammering on with a clearly disastrous body-melting experimental programme. The practical FX is similar, too, and it’s worth adding that the CGI effects in Grafted are less successful than the practical ones on the whole, though they’re probably a necessity.
It feels rather insulting to call a film ‘superficial’, but it fits the bill here on the grounds that Grafted sticks (heh) to surface impressions and notions, moving along too quickly to wallow in the moral ramifications, opting for pace and an often lighter touch rather than pausing or lingering on some sage philosophical point. Whilst there are some bigger picture ideas to consider (Chinese/Western culture clashes, things lost/found in translation and the briefly-dandled idea of ancestral curses), this film dashes through its ideas on identity, consent and ambition to get us to its pretty astonishing finale, and as a result of being neither truly bloodthirsty nor truly messagey, it may struggle to satisfy some audiences. However, there’s lots to like here, and even if Grafted runs out of road to an extent, this is still an entertaining entrant to the new wave of body horror cinema, with great work from its young cast, who literally chop and change between roles as they go.
Grafted (2024) featured at this year’s Final Girls Berlin Festival. You can find out more about the festival here.