“Grafted” Review – Beauty is Skin Deep, but Psychosis Goes All the Way Down

This Isn’t a Glow-Up. It’s a Full Skin Swap.

Let’s get one thing straight: Grafted doesn’t open with soft lighting or gentle metaphors. It kicks off with a father suffocating under his own skin, while his daughter stabs him in the face to keep his airway open. And somehow, that’s just the prologue.

This Mandarin-English feature immediately sets the tone, not poetic, not haunting, but fatal flaw meets familial trauma. Wei, the only daughter of a single father with a facial birth defect, watches him spiral into a human science experiment gone wrong. He’s developing a skin regeneration serum and becomes his own test subject. It ends badly, obviously. The skin grows faster than science can explain, and the man literally drowns in his own dermis.

New Face, Same Misery

Years later, Wei’s in New Zealand with an aunt who’s rarely around, and a cousin, Angie, who is very much present in the worst way possible. Angie and her squad (Eve and Jasmin) embody the kind of bullying that’s social and psychological, and not even clever. Wei’s treated like an unwanted pet in a house full of ring lights and reputation management.

Angie is the kind of character who would destroy a shrine to your dead dad and act like you overreacted. Wei is already grieving, isolated, and trying to re-create her father’s formula. But when Angie pushes too far, shattering a photo frame of Wei’s father, things escalate. One eyeball stabbing later, Wei is cutting off her own face and wearing Angie’s, thanks to a conveniently perfected serum and some disturbingly clean stitching.

No “she snapped” moment. Just a slow and chilling pivot into something feral. And it works. Too well.

How to Win Friends and Incinerate Professors

Paul, Wei’s chemistry professor, is the kind of academic predator horror knows well: manipulative, self-interested, and hooking up with students behind closed doors. He gives Wei lab access, only to steal her work later and plan to profit from her dead dad’s research. He’s shagging Eve. He’s stealing samples. He’s a walking lawsuit with tenure.

Eve doesn’t last long once Wei, now posing as Angie, learns the truth. A power drill to the head and a fresh face later, Wei is impersonating Eve too. She even dyes her hair and swaps contact lenses, pushing this already unraveling identity horror into full-blown sociopathic cosplay.

Paul’s downfall is satisfying. After gaslighting, blackmailing, and sleazing his way through the movie, he ends up injected with the flawed serum and grows his own personalized flesh cocoon. It’s grim. It’s deserved.

Grafted streaming on:

Head in the Fridge, Mind on Revenge

Jasmin’s end? Classic horror escalation. She stumbles across the preserved heads of Angie and Eve in the fridge and, surprise, gets plastic-wrapped in silence. Wei’s casual ability to pivot from impersonation to homicide is the whole point here. She’s not a killer with a code. She’s just efficient.

When the cops start circling and Wei loses her final sample of serum, she flees to the only person who ever saw her as more than a face, John, a disfigured homeless man who offered actual empathy. In her last desperate moment, she seeks refuge with him.

Months later, her aunt spots a girl she mistakes for Wei, only to find the real Wei fused with John’s corpse, cloaked in decay and what’s left of a borrowed identity. It’s a grotesque finale. But it’s earned.

WA Social Climber with a Scalpel

Grafted doesn’t ask you to root for Wei, but it does ask if you understand her. Her rage isn’t random. Her descent makes sense. The film’s horror lies not just in the gore but in the clarity: this is what happens when cruelty and ambition have no brakes.

The identity shifts echo The Substance, A Different Man, and even a few films you’ve seen on this site that poke around inside the skin of self-worth. But Grafted stands out by letting Wei stay in control… even when she’s completely unhinged.

WTF Out of 5?

4 out of 5 faces stolen and flawlessly reapplied

Not because Wei is likable. Not because it’s pretty. But because it hits hard, sharp, and with enough scalpels to make face theft almost believable. It’s clean horror, even when it’s messy.