Grafted: Movie Review

Cast: Joyena Sun, Jess Hong, Eden Hart, Jared Turner, Sepi To’a
Director: Sasha Rainbow

Serving as both a story about the horrors of skin transplantation and an allegory for the transplantation of an immigrant into a new life, New Zealand film Grafted focuses on Wei, who has a blemish on her face.

When Wei’s scientist father dies after a breakthrough, she leaves her home in China to head to New Zealand to live with her aunt and cousin, the glamorous Angela. Determined to continue her father’s research, Wei finds her in on a scholarship, but suffers from being ostracised by her peers and her cousin’s clique.

Pushed to the edge, Wei launches on an audacious revenge spree that escalates more than she could imagine.

Grafted is an impressive piece of horror in parts, that deals with societal standards over beauty and the fear of assimilation into a new culture. But director Sash Rainbow seems in parts too frightened to fully commit to a definite genre, meshing satire with full-on blood and gore (which sometimes feel limited by the budget).

When the film goes full tilt into its premise and leans 110% into its Face/Off Mean Girls mash up, it’s a thrillingly audacious piece of splatter-fest that wouldn’t be out of place in the Incredibly Strange festivals of yore.

But too often, it holds back – and despite some great digital FX and some skin-crawling moments, Grafted seems, sadly, to reject some attempts to attach itself to any particular kind of filmic host and consequently, while it’s great to see Kiwi filmmakers embracing a new cultural way of telling a very familiar story, it feels like a slightly missed opportunity.

This film is playing as part of the 2024 Whanau Marama New Zealand International Film Festival. For more details, visit nziff.co.nz