Review by
Eric Hillis
Directed by: Sasha Rainbow
Starring: Joyena Sun, Jess Hong, Eden Hart, Jared Turner, Sepi Toa, Xiao Hu
Body horror meets body swap comedy to entertaining effect in Sasha Rainbow's directorial debut Grafted. Like its more lauded but inferior cousin The Substance, Grafted takes the sort of plot that fuelled many a 1950s Roger Corman
b-movie and redploys it to examine feminine beauty standards. But Rainbow
adds race to the mix, interrogating how eastern immigrants are judged, and
judge themselves, by white western metrics of attractiveness.
Like her father, Wei (Joyena Sun) was born with a large red
blemish on her left cheek, which she self-consciously tries to conceal
beneath a scarf. Determined to improve his daughter's lot in life, Wei's
dad devoted his life to researching a revolutionary skin grafting
technique, but in a grisly prologue we see how it went disastrously wrong
when his attempt to use himself as a guinea pig lead to a gruesome death.
Despite witnessing her father's demise as a young girl, Wei grows up
determined to carry on his research.
Wei gets the opportunity she's been longing for when she's awarded a
scholarship at a New Zealand university. Leaving China, Wei moves to
Kiwiland where she is taken in by her divorced Aunty Ling (Xiao Hu). Wei's westernised cousin Angela (Jess Hong) is none too happy
with her arrival, feeling especially isolated when Wei and Ling speak
Chinese, a language Angela never felt worthy of learning. Wei is similarly
mistreated by Angela's mean girl besties, Margot Robbie-alike Eve (Eden Hart) and Pacific Islander Jasmine (Sepi Toa), though in private the
latter confesses to Wei that she sympathises with her outsider status.
When her teacher, Paul (Jared Turner), asks for a lab assistant,
Wei jumps at the chance. Discovering Wei's plans to carry on her father's
work, Paul sees this as the opportunity he's been waiting for to make a
name for himself, initially aiding Wei while secretly plotting to take the
credit for himself if the technique succeeds.
Wei is the latest in a long line of horror movie boffins who
single-mindedly develop some revolutionary new process, initially with
good intentions, only for the process to backfire and lead to bloodshed.
We know that at some point our young anti-heroine will believe she's
perfected her process but that she'll soon find it's riddled with flaws.
When Wei thinks she has figured out her father's formula, it leads to a
path of murder, with Wei donning the grafted-on faces of her victims to
conceal her crimes.
This is where the body swap comedy comes in, as Wei attempts to pose as
her teenage victims, donning their skimpy outfits and struggling to walk
in high heels. To pull it off, rainbow requires Sun, Hong and Hart to all
play Wei in three different bodies, and the young actresses do a wonderful
job, with Hong and Hart tasked with the double whammy of mimicking Sun's
Wei mimicking their own characters. The performers are so convincing that
we can easily overlook any differences in stature, skin tone or body
shape.
Rainbow uses this conceit to slyly comment on the western beauty standard
food chain, with Wei climbing the ladder, initially taking the face of her
westernised cousin before advancing to the blue-eyed blonde Eve, with Wei
noting how she's perceived differently in each progressive skin by those
around her (as the white Eve, she finds it's easy to fob off anyone who
attempts to get in her way, be it a nosy neighbour or snooping police
detectives). When Jasmine attempts to befriend Wei, we find ourselves
questioning if she's being sincere or if she selfishly wants to use Wei's
outsider status to make herself stand out less.
The narrative sutures begin to come apart in a final act that misses out on an
opportunity to further its commentary by declining to have Wei take on the
face of a white man (come on, the awful Paul is right there!), and a climactic twist comes off as an ill thought out opportunity for some Screaming Mad
George style body-fusing rather than a satisfying thematic conclusion. But
for the most part this is an assured and highly promising debut from
Rainbow, who lends a woman's touch to a previously male-dominated horror
sub-genre.
Grafted is on Shudder from
January 24th.
