‘Grafted’ Review: This Body-Swapping Horror Movie Doesn’t Know What It Wants to Be

In a dingy lab somewhere in China, a young girl named Wei (Mohan Liu) watches her father, Liu (Sam Wang), go about his work. He’s developing a new kind of skin graft procedure that he hopes will rid both of them of the large purple birthmarks adorning their faces. And like your average B-movie scientist with a little too much on the line, Liu decides to use himself as a guinea pig. He applies a strange, fleshy substance to his face and then grins triumphantly as it wriggles into life, replacing his birthmark and melding perfectly with the rest of his skin. But Liu’s delight quickly turns to horror as he discovers—like, well, so many B-movie scientists before him—that his invention works a little too well, and with deadly consequences.

Grafted is full of spluttering effects that look and sound wet and nasty, and they’re employed in such an imaginative way that the film is sure to unlock a new fear for plenty of viewers. And while the early promise shown in Sasha Rainbow’s film doesn’t take quite as disastrous a turn as poor Liu’s research, it does ultimately fail to live up to this invigorating opening.

Grafted then shuttles forward to catch up with a teenage Wei (now played by Joyena Sun) as she hops on a plane to New Zealand to go live with her mean-girl cousin, Angela (Jess Hong). Clutching her father’s old notebook, Wei enrolls at Auckland University, determined to complete his research and “become beautiful.” This ambition is heightened by every awkward interaction Wei has with Angela and her besties, the brutal, Barbie doll-like Eve (Eden Hart) and the sympathetic but weak-willed Jasmine (Sepi To’a). Wei desperately wants to be like these cool, confident, gorgeous girls, and that wish comes true when she discovers that her father’s skin-grafting material can also be used to perform facial transplants, Face/Off-style.

From here, Grafted becomes a dark sort of body-swap comedy as Wei commits one grisly act of identity theft after another. As in John Woo’s classic thriller, as well as last year’s It’s What’s Inside, this goofy premise provides the film’s cast with the chance to deliver nesting-doll performances where they act as their character and then act as Wei acting as their character.

Outside of this imitation game, the acting in Grafted can be quite patchy, though the woodenness does lend a certain chintzy charm to the proceedings, feeling in tune with the film’s shlock-horror vibe. The same can be said for the effects, which range from the effectively gruesome to the hilariously basic. At one point, when a character has had their face removed, the make-up used to convey the bloody mess of exposed flesh left behind actually looks more like the character has gone at a jar of strawberry jam with a little too much gusto.

Grafted’s biggest problem is that it loses all momentum once the face-swapping kicks into motion, meandering along with no real sense of rising danger or ensuing consequence as the baton is passed from one victim to the next. It doesn’t manage to play Wei’s descent into monstrosity as a genuine tragedy or a serious meditation on the cruelty of beauty standards, but it also can’t quite seem to whip itself up into the kind of frenzied finale that a straightforward slasher demands. Just like Wei, dressed in her latest victim’s clothes with a corner of her new face just beginning to peel off, Grafted doesn’t quite seem to know what it wants to be.