A Chinese student travels to New Zealand to complete her deceased father’s scientific work, only to discover a new way to achieve the popularity she desperately craves — by putting her experiments to a terrifying new use. A film by Sasha Rainbow, starring Joyena Sun, Jess Hong, Eden Hart, Jared Turner, and Sepi To’a.

Directed by New Zealand filmmaker Sasha Rainbow in her directorial debut from a screenplay she co-wrote with Mia Maramara, Hweiling Ow, and Lee Murray, GRAFTED is a visceral body horror film that follows Wei, a young Chinese scholarship student. Wei has suffered from a mysterious skin condition since birth – though never explicitly explained in the film, it manifests as reddish patches on her face, resembling Purpura or Psoriasis.

Purpura is characterized by purple, red, or brown spots on the skin or mucous membranes, resulting from blood leakage from small blood vessels under the skin. It is not a condition in itself but rather a symptom of an underlying issue. Some instances of purpura may resolve on their own, but chronic conditions may require ongoing management.

Her scientist father Lui (Sam Wang) suffers from the same skin condition. Some believe their family was cursed due to past misdeeds. In his makeshift home laboratory, Lui conducts unorthodox experiments, attempting to graft healthy patches of skin onto himself to conceal and heal his condition – ultimately hoping to find a way to make his daughter beautiful.

Psoriasis is a chronic, noncontagious, autoimmune, inflammatory skin disease characterized by patches of abnormal skin. These patches can appear red, pink, or purple, and are often dry, itchy, and scaly. Symptoms can range from mild to severe. Psoriasis is not curable, but treatments are available to manage symptoms and prevent infection.

The experiment goes terribly wrong when the grafted skin, though initially successful, begins to expand and rapidly covers his entire face, including his mouth and eyes. In a panic, Lui slashes at his face with a scalpel, desperately trying to remove the skin that’s blocking his airways. But to his horror, the skin instantly heals itself. As he stumbles to the floor struggling to breathe, young Wei (Mohan Liu) frantically tries to save her father by repeatedly stabbing his face. Despite her efforts, Lui suffocates and dies.

Years later, teenage Wei (Joyena Sun) receives a full scholarship to University West in New Zealand. She moves to Auckland to live with her aunt Ling (Xiao Hu) and teenage cousin Angela (Jess Hong). Ling works in direct sales, frequently traveling to other cities to sell cosmetics, leaving her rarely home. Though Ling warmly welcomes Wei, hoping she’ll be a good influence on Angela, the relationship between mother and daughter is strained. Angela barely speaks to her mother and frequently goes out spending money, showing no interest in finding part-time work to help the family after her father abandoned them mid-house renovation.

At university, Wei impresses Professor Paul (Jared Turner) by scoring 100% on his pop quiz and applies for a lab assistant position. In Paul’s lab, she’s thrilled to discover that Paul’s grafting research closely mirrors her father’s work. Wei becomes obsessed, determined to continue her father’s legacy and find a cure for her skin condition through grafting techniques.

When Paul learns of Lui’s notebook containing his grafting research, he’s fascinated despite only being able to understand the drawings, as the text is entirely in Chinese. While he accepts Wei as his lab assistant, he secretly plans to use her for his own project.
Faced with a deadline to prove results or lose his funding, Paul desperately steals Wei’s notebook, photographs it, and sends the images to friends for translation.

Meanwhile, tension grows between the cousins as Angela increasingly resents Wei’s presence. She’s particularly bothered by Wei’s appearance and cultural practices, including her household altar and the smell of incense. The situation worsens when Wei embarrasses Angela in front of her best friends Eve (Eden Hart) and Jasmine (Sepi To’a) by revealing that Angela’s favorite food is chicken feet.

Frustration mounts as Paul and Wei fail to find a binding agent that can successfully merge skin tissue. When Wei spots a leaflet about a corpse flower exhibition at the Western Gardens, she remembers a drawing of the plant in her father’s notebook. One evening, she sneaks into the gardens and extracts fluid from the corpse flower. To her delight, as she experiments on herself, she discovers it’s the perfect binding agent she’s been searching for.

The corpse flower (Amorphophallus titanum) is a rare tropical plant native to the rainforests of Sumatra, Indonesia. It is known for its putrid smell, which resembles rotting flesh, and for producing the largest unbranched inflorescence in the plant kingdom. . It can grow up to 8 feet tall in cultivation and up to 12 feet tall in its natural habitat. Corpse flowers do not have an annual blooming cycle. After the plant is at least 7 to 10 years old, some plants manage to flower every 2 to 3 years. However, blooms are very rare, occurring for about 24 hours every few years. After the spathe opens fully, the bloom usually lasts until the following afternoon. In December 2024, a corpse flower bloomed at the Auckland Zoo.

Things take a darker turn when Eve, who’s secretly in a relationship with Paul, misinterprets a scene where Wei shows Paul her experimental results on her inner thigh. Eve snaps a photo and sends it to Angela, assuming Wei and Paul are romantically involved.

Enraged, Angela destroys Wei’s household altar. Their heated argument turns violent, and during the struggle, Wei accidentally stabs Angela in the eye, killing her. In shock and panic, Wei drags Angela’s body to the bathroom. In a horrifying decision, she peels off Angela’s facial skin, binds it to her own face using her grafting liquid, and begins impersonating her cousin.

It’s difficult to discuss GRAFTED without comparing it to THE SUBSTANCE, as both films explore protagonists who’ll do whatever it takes to become ‘better versions’ of themselves.

THE SUBSTANCE pulls it off by going completely off the rails – each scene gets crazier than the last until reality just goes out the window. GRAFTED, on the other hand, tries to play it straight with all its gore while staying somewhat grounded in reality. The problem lies in the script, as you still have to shut off your brain quite a bit to buy into what these characters are doing – their choices and behavior just don’t make much sense.

The three leads — Joyena Sun, Jess Hong, and Eden Hart — deliver impressive performances, particularly Jess Hong and Eden Hart, who face the complex challenge of portraying characters that Wei attempts to become. They skillfully capture the unsettling dynamic of Wei mimicking their personalities while wearing their faces.

However, the film’s approach to physical transformation feels too simplistic. The idea that wearing someone else’s facial skin would result in a perfect resemblance ignores basic anatomy – people have different bone structures and facial contours that make them unique. Unlike superficial changes like dyeing hair or wearing heels to appear taller, facial features are determined by underlying structures that can’t be masked by simply wearing someone else’s skin.

Sasha Rainbow and cinematographer Tammy Williams showcase a unique style within the body horror genre. Hopefully, we’ll see Sasha Rainbow’s promising talent shine in her next feature film, backed by a more fleshed-out and believable script — one that perhaps doesn’t require four people to write.

GRAFTED premiered at NZIFF (New Zealand International Film Festival) on 8 August 2024. The film was theatrically released in New Zealand on 12 September.