Ready for a horror movie that’s sure to make your skin crawl? Then brace yourself for Grafted. In her feature debut, New Zealand director Sasha Rainbow gifts us this gnarly tale of an ugly duckling who uses experimental science to become the swan of her dreams — and our nightmares.
Joyena Sun stars as Wei, a Chinese scholarship student who travels to New Zealand to pursue medical research at an illustrious university. However, while Wei has a brilliant brain, she’s afflicted by insecurities over a facial birthmark. This makes her a target for her pretty, popular, and vicious cousin Angela (Jess Hong). But by burrowing into the skin-grafting research of her late father, Wei believes she can fix herself from the outside in. So begins a dark journey of jealousy and twisted self-discovery.
From the trailer above, you get a sense of Rainbow’s splashy brand of body horror, along with the buzz Grafted picked up on the film festival circuit. Critics have been gagged, and soon it’ll be your turn.
