In today’s Friday Feature, self-experimentation goes awry. Gina Myers takes a knife to the 2025 body horror flick Grafted. Published February 7, 2025.

Grafted (2025)

The movie opens in a lab set up in a cramped apartment where Wei, our protagonist, is a child who witnesses her father’s self-experimentation go terribly wrong. Despite this, Wei commits herself to continuing his work, searching for the missing binding agent that will create a seamless skin graft that will cure her own facial deformity. This takes her from her home in China to a university in New Zealand where she is alienated from her classmates, including her cousin Angela, who she desperately wants to fit in with. She begins doing research under a creepy student-fucking professor who intends to take credit for her and her father’s work. The pressure is building and Wei is pushed past the point of no return after a fight with her cousin, following which her self-experimentation reaches a new level of horror. But this is just the beginning for Wei who, driven by her desire to be beautiful and to get back her father’s research, continues to spiral out of control, becoming less and less like the girl who arrived in New Zealand. 

Wei, played by Joyena Sun, is a tragic figure. She is not capable of seeing that she is fine as she is, nor seeing that the girls who make fun of her food and cultural practices are xenophobic. She envies her cousin, who was born in New Zealand, speaks perfect English, and denies her cultural heritage, and holds Eve, Angela’s blond-haired friend, up as the standard of beauty. Other than Wei, the characters in the film are underdeveloped, coming across as caricatures of mean girls, an egotistical chauvinist professor, and a nosy neighbor. Despite this, the actors deliver strong performances, especially Jesse Hong, who plays Angela, and Eden Hart, who plays mean girl Eve. And let’s not forget Bikkie, the Chihuahua, who stands in for the viewer, witnessing Wei’s descent and barking in distress all along the way. 

[Spoiler warning.] In horror, we choose to accept the reality of the world we’re given, so we accept, too, that once Wei begins pretending to be someone else, no one in that person’s life notices something is off. Auntie Ling hugs her “daughter” and does not recognize that Angela’s body and demeanor is different—but then again, she did want Angela to be more like her cousin. And it’s really no surprise that Paul doesn’t recognize Wei as Eve, since he doesn’t really see Eve as a complete person anyway. Wei’s passing works as long as the skin holds up and the police don’t look too close, but it won’t last forever. When the world is closing in on Wei and it seems like the movie is running out of places to go, the film delivers one final terrible twist. 3.5 out of 5 sacs of blood.

—Gina Myers