Grafted
|The suburbs of Auckland could not be more different from the noisy, crowded Chinese apartment block where Wei grew up with her father, units stacked upon one another, he working on his experiments, cutting and grafting flesh, while she sketched in her notebook, but some things are not so different, accepted to study biochemistry on a scholarship but still treated as an outsider, an outcast, conscious of her birthmark and hiding her face.
Welcomed by her Aunty Ling but rejected for her reserved manner and traditions by her modern cousin Angela who rallies her classmates Eve and Jasmine to taunt and bully her, Wei throws herself into her course and her laboratory work, but there is a catch, her tutor Doctor Paul Featherstone a former prodigy now struggling to maintain funding, less interested in an assistant seeking extra credit than research he can claim for his own.
A bloody tangle of peer pressure, unreasonable beauty standards, cultural differences and family expectations, Grafted is directed by Sasha Rainbow from a script co-written with Mia Maramara, Hweiling Ow and Lee Murray which sees Joyena Sun’s diligent Wei wishing to do nothing more than to pursue her studies but caught up in a system of cruelty and exploitation with no protection from family or the academic system.
With Xiao Hu as Aunty Ling, barely present as she builds her beauty product empire, Jess Hong as the spoiled and selfish Angela and Sepi To’a as the less judgemental Jasmine, the real threat comes from Eden Hart as Eve, ringleader of the circus of cruelty and Jared Turner as Paul, abusing his position with an inappropriate relation with Eve and operating without any oversight or professional ethics, the only person who genuinely accepts Wei for who she is John (Mark Mitchinson) the homeless deformed man who lives under the bridge.
Wei a dedicated researcher who wishes for nothing more than to be left alone, she attempts to perfect the skin grafting technique developed by her father, using her own body for her experiments, and from the surreal and freaky opening scene Grafted walks a line of mean girl satire and body horror, Wei literally stealing beauty from the others girls, accepted as one of the pretty girls with little difficulty when their interests never exceed the superficial.
Resourceful but not forward thinking, Wei’s unsustainable actions are mediated by desperation as bodies begin to pile up around the house and concerns are raised about the missing students, though tellingly her own absence from class is never questioned, the unwanted overachiever whose extreme actions are understandable in the circumstances though their ultimate end is little surprise, the parallels with The Substance apparent though presumably coincidental as Grafted would have been shot before that was unleashed.
Grafted will be available on Shudder from Friday 24th January