Grafted (New Zealand, 2024)

Once again, I decided to pick a film pretty much at random. I don’t think I’d heard anyone even mention Grafted, but the synopsis suggested body horror, which is always an easy sell for me.

Grafted is currently streaming on Shudder in the UK.

Synopsis

Wei’s father is a medical researcher, developing a treatment for the large birthmarks both he and Wei have on their faces. His experiment with a new skin grafting technique goes horribly wrong as the skin envelopes his face, suffocating him. We tries to cut him a new mouth, but the skin keeps growing back, suffocating him.

Years later, Wei enrols at a university in Auckland, and moves from China to New Zealand. Her aunt offers to put her up, which immediately puts Wei into conflict with her cousin, Angie. Some of this conflict is the hoary old trope of Angie being a popular kid and Wei being a nerd, but Angie also finds Wei weird for adhering to Chinese traditions that her family have long abandoned.

Even at the university, Wei struggles to fit in. Angie’s friends bully her, and her apparently friendly professor is only interested in stealing Wei’s father’s work. Wei’s fortunes change, however, when she figures out how to make her father’s grafting technique work safely. Happily, this means that when Wei accidentally kills Angie, she can cut off her cousin’s face and steal her identity.

Of course, this is only the beginning, as Wei finds herself killing more and more people to protect her father’s work and her own secrets.

General Thoughts

Body horror films need to be grotesque to work, and Grafted certainly tries to gross us out. There are some cool visuals with the amped-up skin grafts oozing around like little shoggoths. The scenes where Wei experiments on herself, peeling strips of skin from her inner thigh and trying to graft them back are especially toe-curling. Too many of the effects look cheap, however, with missing faces looking more like an accident with a ketchup sachet.

Wei’s extreme form of identity theft, in which she cuts people’s faces off and grafts the skin to her own face, doesn’t bear much thinking about. Not only does this somehow perfectly replicate the underlying bone structure, but no one notices any differences in build, height, or skin tone. Wei does at least struggle with impersonating her victims’ voices and mannerisms, but even that comes too easily for someone who speaks in heavily accented English. She also gets away with leaving rotting corpses lying around and letting prospective victims flee the house for far too long.

The first half of Grafted tries to get us to sympathise with Wei by having her be bullied relentlessly, and it becomes gruelling. If I hadn’t been reviewing the film, I might have put it off after 30 minutes. Even the family dog hates Wei. While I appreciate that this was supposed to motivate Wei’s villain turn, it made too much of the film impossible to enjoy.

Verdict

I would rather see a terrible horror film than a mediocre one. A terrible film is probably going to fail in interesting ways, and watching it may be either funny or an enlightening cautionary tale. Mediocre films, on the other hand, rarely offer anything of interest. They are frustrating echoes of what might have been, and are quickly forgotten.

Grafted is a mediocre film.

On paper, Grafted really should be the kind of thing I enjoy. It’s a body horror film with a few squicky medical scenes and a dark ending. The problem is that it all feels half-baked. The writing is lazy and obvious, and the performances are largely too flat to sell the dialogue. I struggled to suspend my disbelief as characters behaved in completely implausible ways, and wild coincidences kept the plot from falling apart. The ending was downbeat and ironic, but the execution was too clumsy to give it any real impact. All in all, Grafted felt like a cheap TV move with a few halfway decent makeup effects.

If you’re looking for some entertaining body horror to watch in the run-up to Halloween, I’d recommend looking elsewhere. Even if what you pick is worse than Grafted, you’ll probably find it more memorable.

The October Horror Movie Challenge

Please do join in and share your own thoughts with us about this or any other films as the month goes on. You can usually find us on BlueSky, Reddit, Discord, or lurking in the dark corners of your home.

If you would like to play along at home, my provisional selections are:

Heretic (USA, 2024)
The Sadness (Taiwan, 2021)
The Uninvited (USA, 1944)
The Lodge (UK/USA, 2019)
WolfCop (Canada, 2014)
Valerie and Her Week of Wonders (Czechoslovakia, 1970)
The Monkey (USA, 2025)
Sister Midnight (India/UK, 2024)
Roadgames (Australia, 1981)
Nightmare City (Italy, 1985)
Dangerous Animals (Australia, 2025)
Dead Talents Society (Taiwan, 2024)
Winterbeast (USA, 1992)
Byzantium (UK/Ireland, 2013)
The Ugly Stepsister (Norway, 2025)
A Page of Madness (Japan, 1926)
Heart Eyes (USA, 2025)
Grafted (New Zealand, 2024)
Arrebato (Spain, 1979)
Hatching (Finland, 2022)
Abigail (USA, 2024)
Ganja & Hess (USA, 1973)
The Devil’s Bath (Austria, 2025)
Pieces (Spain, 1982)
Infested (France, 2023)
Best Wishes to All (Japan, 2022)
A Cat in the Brain (Italy, 1990)
Enys Men (UK, 2022)
Creature From the Black Lagoon (USA, 1954)
Perewangan (Indonesia, 2024)
Bring Her Back (Australia, 2025)

A Final Note

If you have been enticed here by these posts, please do look around at some of our other film reviews. We also have a podcast, called The Good Friends of Jackson Elias, which occasionally covers horror films. If this appeals, you might want to check out some of the following episodes.