Grafted‘s Take on Body Horror Squishes The Substance Into Mean Girls

Body horror is having a moment thanks to The Substance, a movie that’s not dissimilar to Sasha Rainbow’s new Shudder release Grafted. But the New Zealand-set tale also draws on elements that go back to genre king David Cronenberg‘s foundational works, including The Fly—and wraps them in a story that peppers in Mean Girls and even a little Barbie, examining a worst-case scenario in “girl world.”

Grafted begins with a flashback that establishes the unusually strong bond between a girl named Wei and her scientist father—or make that mad scientist father, since his single-minded pursuit of a cure for the unsightly facial birthmark that both he and his daughter have has pushed him into making some highly questionable choices. In that first scene, he meets a tragic and repulsive end before her frightened young eyes, and though you might think that’d teach her a lesson about being responsible in the lab, it most certainly does not.

A few years in the future, Wei (now played by Joyena Sun) leaves China, where she overhears a relative saying she’s earned a reputation for being “a monster,” for Auckland, where a full-ride college scholarship and a free place to live at her aunt’s house await. A fresh start sounds like just the ticket for the brilliant but socially awkward student—she’s agonizingly self-conscious about her appearance—but she immediately has a hard time fitting in, especially since her cousin Angela (3 Body Problem‘s Jess Hong) is constantly rolling her eyes at how lame she is. One of Angela’s biggest cruelties is disrespecting the altar Wei uses to pay tribute to her beloved father, a part of their shared Chinese heritage that Angela couldn’t be less interested in embracing.

© Matt Grace/Shudder

Before long, the girls’ sleazy science professor (Jared Turner) zeroes in on Wei, imagining that her father’s old research notebook—which she clings to like a sacred text—contains the kind of big discovery that’ll restore his fading academic reputation. While there is indeed a breakthrough in its pages, as Grafted soon reveals, it’s nothing that’s going to make the world a better place, much less a more beautiful place as Wei fervently hopes.

Grafted’s first big plot twist presents itself fairly early in the film; we won’t spoil any specifics, but it’s so startling and happens so quickly it might make you wonder where the story can possibly go from there. Things can and do get exponentially worse for Wei, but she also enjoys a few precious moments of surreal joy, testing out new identities for herself when she’s briefly freed from the self-perceived ugliness that’s entrapped her entire life.

While a lot of Grafted is there to make you recoil at its dripping, oozing bad medicine, it also spends time digging into the intricacies of relationships between friends and frenemies, particularly among young women. Sun and Hong—as well as Eden Hart as Eve, Angela’s Margot Robbie lookalike bestie—make the social tensions feel just as high-stakes as the increasingly gruesome secret Wei is having a harder and harder time hiding. That the young women drift through life mostly unsupervised (Angela’s mother is perpetually gone on work trips; her estranged dad is just a voice on the phone) escalates the spiral of chaos that begins to encircle them.

© Matt Grace/Shudder

That’s further enhanced by Grafted‘s production design, which blends gory crimes in the dark with the neon pink hues of Wei and Angela’s house—where the mood of unease is echoed in the unfinished renovations that clutter its exterior. The film also makes some creative stylistic choices, conveying the anxiety of receiving a bad-news email or text with a quick jigsaw puzzle of edits—and hits on the perfect ambient anxiety trigger by giving Angela a small dog that yaps non-stop. It also crescendoes to a finale that’s as surprising as it is well-earned, as well as gross as hell.

Directed and co-written by New Zealand filmmaker Sasha Rainbow, Grafted begins streaming on Shudder Friday, January 24.

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