If you’ve ever thought, “What if Mean Girls and The Fly had a baby raised on expired skincare products?”, then congratulations: Grafted (2024) is exactly the movie you should avoid.
Marketed as a “coming-of-age body horror,” it ends up functioning more as a warning to every university admissions office: stop handing out research lab access to emotionally unstable freshmen who show up with suspicious notebooks and a suspiciously dead father.
The Plot: Skin in the Game… Too Much Skin
The movie opens by traumatizing the audience with a father slicing at his own neck like he’s trying to win a speedrun of “Worst Parenting Moment of the Decade.” He’s testing his regeneration serum — which works, if your definition of “works” includes being smothered by your own skin folds like a biological beanbag chair.
Young Wei witnesses this and apparently decides to honor his memory by:
-
Becoming a brilliant university prodigy,
-
Carrying generational trauma like a purse,
-
And eventually becoming a serial killer with a scrapbooking obsession and a freezer full of heads.
This is the part of the movie where the audience collectively goes:
“Is this a STEM scholarship or an introductory course for future villains?”
Wei: Academia’s Worst Nightmare
Wei, played by Joyena Sun, is socially awkward, brilliant, and one bad day away from screaming into a microscope. She arrives in New Zealand to live with her aunt Ling and her cousin Angela — a walking influencer stereotype whose entire purpose is to be mean, fashionable, and tragically unaware that she lives in a horror movie where being mean gets you turned into someone’s face accessory.
Wei’s entire arc is:
-
Get bullied.
-
Do science.
-
Get bullied harder.
-
Do more science.
-
Kill bully.
-
Become bully.
-
Repeat.
It’s like Face/Off meets Project Runway, except no one wins and everyone looks like their face was glued on by a blind taxidermist.
The Science: Somewhere Between “Absolutely Not” and “Please Stop”
Wei discovers that corpse flowers — yes, literal giant stinky blossoms — are the missing ingredient in her father’s groundbreaking regeneration serum.
Because when you think “rapid skin graft bonding,” you definitely think “rotting plant that smells like Satan’s armpit.”
She tests the serum by… no joke… cutting her OWN face off like she’s peeling an orange. Then she slaps her dead cousin’s face onto hers like a Halloween mask bought at the last minute.
The serum instantly seals the wound.
Dermatologists everywhere collectively screamed into their serums.
Cousin Angela: Mean Girl → Face Mask
Angela is the kind of character who says things like:
-
“Why are you so weird?”
-
“Your shrine is ugly.”
-
“Your ancestors probably hate you.”
She dies as she lived: loudly, dramatically, and wearing makeup that was completely wasted on that scene.
Wei stabs her in the eyeball, steals her face, and then lives as her. Yes. Settle in — this is only kill number one.
Kill Count & Identity Theft: A Visual Breakdown
Victim #1: Angela
Face stolen. Body chopped. Identity hijacked.
Honestly, Angela should sue… except she can’t. Because she’s a frozen head in a fridge next to some questionable leftovers.
Victim #2: Eve
Power drill to the face. Then Wei becomes her too.
It’s like Pokémon: Identity Edition. Gotta steal ’em all.
Victim #3: Jasmin
Smothered with plastic wrap.
At this point, Wei is practically a living advertisement for office supplies.
Victim #4: Paul the Professor
Injected with the “turn your skin into an aggressive duvet” serum.
This is the moment where the film tries to be profound with body horror but instead looks like someone trapped inside a melting marshmallow.
Professor Paul: Worst Mentor Since Palpatine
Paul initially seems like a support figure — a weary professor trying to guide Wei through daddy-issues science. Then we learn:
-
He’s stealing Wei’s research.
-
He’s sleeping with students.
-
He’s selling her father’s notes to Big Science™ for cash.
So naturally, Wei kills him using the same experimental formula that killed her father.
In the film’s defense, this is the only scientifically accurate moment:
“If your coworker keeps taking credit for your work, turn him into a pile of carnivorous skin.”
John: The Only Nice Person → Unfortunate Final Monster
John is a sweet, homeless man with deformities, offering calm, compassion, and kindness.
So of course this movie turns him into a half-rotting flesh fusion beast with Wei.
By the end, Wei has physically and symbolically merged with the only person who ever cared about her, which is depressing even before you factor in the corpse parts.
The final reveal — Wei as a decaying mass of grafted tissue wrapped in John’s blanket — hits you like:
“What would happen if Ed Gein tried arts and crafts?”
It’s grim. It’s grotesque. It’s… actually one of the only moments that works.
The Themes: Trauma! Identity! Skin! Skin! More Skin!
This movie desperately wants to be about:
-
cultural displacement,
-
generational trauma,
-
academic exploitation,
-
the immigrant experience,
-
AND body autonomy.
Instead, it ends up being about:
-
face swapping,
-
fridge storage safety violations,
-
and why you should never major in science if you have unresolved family issues.
Aunt Ling: World’s Most Oblivious Guardian
Ling somehow fails to notice:
-
missing family members,
-
dead classmates,
-
her niece walking around with different faces every week,
-
AND the rotting skulls inside their freezer.
Ling shows up just often enough to remind us that child supervision is optional in this film.
Final Verdict: A Horror Film With More Identity Crises Than Its Characters
Grafted tries to be Carrie, Raw, Orphan Black, and The Fly at the same time. Instead, it becomes the cinematic equivalent of a science fair project gone explosively wrong.
It could have been a clever metaphor about immigrant pressure and self-reinvention.
Instead, it’s mostly:
-
face peeling,
-
personality theft,
-
homicidal lab work,
-
and a final creature reveal that looks like a rejected Silent Hill boss.
Props for ambition. Negative points for execution that feels like the director grafted five different movies together — none of which were compatible.
Rating: 2/10
One point for commitment.
One point for giving me a new fear of skincare routines.
If you enjoy body horror, you might enjoy this.
If you have a face you plan on keeping, you won’t.
