My quick rating – 5.4/10. Grafted seems to ask the question, “What if Mean Girls got a full-body transplant… and then promptly forgot to check the mirror?” What begins as a creepy little tale of transformation and revenge quickly spirals into something that feels like it got lost halfway between an episode of Botched and a student film with a surprisingly generous make-up budget.
Wei (Joyena Sun) is our socially awkward genius from China who wins a scholarship to a bougie New Zealand university, where everyone seems to have taken Advanced Bullying 101. Cue the trio of Mean Girls who exist solely to sneer, scoff, and plot poolside selfies. After enduring their cold shoulders and hot takes, Wei finds an alternative method to fit in, one that involves surgical precision, a little face-swapping, and a whole lot of disbelief suspension.
Now, let’s talk logic—or rather, the complete disregard for it. When Wei replaces Eve (Eden Hart), her classmates somehow fail to notice that Eve’s lost about six inches in height and dropped two shoe sizes. I mean, her “friends” had no idea when the Wei version of Angela had done a 180 in her entire personality, but the Eve discrepancy is distractingly off? The face effects are, admittedly, creepily well done. It’s everything below the neck that screams, “Please don’t look too hard.”
The most baffling bit? Aunty (Xiao Hu), who initially beams with pride at Wei’s arrival, apparently can’t tell when her niece disappears, and a shell of her daughter Angela is walking around in her place. Maybe she just thought uni changed her. (It does do that to people, though not usually via skin graft.)
The film does flirt with greatness at times. The make-up work deserves a standing ovation, or at least a polite clap. There are moments of unsettling tension and dark humor that promise something deeper. But just when it starts getting juicy, Grafted backs off and opts for a final act so generic and toothless it might as well have been written by ChatGPT in sleep mode. If you recently saw The Substance and are expecting another movie of that caliber, you will be disappointed.
Is the acting bad? Not at all. Sun does a solid job flipping between wide-eyed loner and dead-eyed doppelgänger. It’s just that she’s stuck in a script that never gives her—or us—anything to really feel. No pathos. No tragedy. Just a clumsy shuffle toward a climax that ends not with a bang but a bloodless meh.
Bottom line: Grafted could’ve been a chilling tale of identity, belonging, and the cost of popularity. Instead, it’s a reminder that just because you can surgically steal someone’s face doesn’t mean you should, especially if you’re not willing to wear their shoes… literally.
Watch it if you’re bored and in the mood for Face/Off on a ramen budget with zero impact. Just don’t expect it to leave a lasting impression, unlike Wei’s scalpels.