Move out of the way, The Substance. There's a new body horror film in town, and it’s more twisted, gory, and psychologically unsettling than anything you've seen before. We're talking about Grafted, a Shudder original that's now streaming.
Making her feature debut, Sasha Rainbow helmed this satirical body horror from a screenplay she wrote with Mia Maramara, Hweiling Ow, and Lee Murray. It stars up-and-coming actress Joyena Sun as a shy and timid Chinese scholarship student named Wei, who finds herself not fitting in with her peers at her prestigious university in New Zealand due to a facial deformity.
Determined to transform her life, Wei delves into her late father's groundbreaking work of skin grafting, a procedure that could potentially cure her condition. However, as her experiments spiral out of control, her desperation to achieve perfection pushes her to dangerous extremes, including murder.
How does everything wrap up for Wei in Grafted? If you need a little breakdown of the film’s shocking conclusion, we’ve got you covered. Here's where Wei ends up at the end of the body horror.
Spoilers from Grafted ahead!
Wei's quest for beauty unravels in ways both tragic and terrifying
When Wei was a little girl, she would watch her father work on his revolutionary skin grafting procedure. Her father wanted to cure his and her facial deformities, but in an experiment gone wrong, the procedure ultimately cost him his life. Many years later, Wei leaves her hometown behind to live with her aunt and cousin in New Zealand, where she enrolls in a distinguished university.
However, she doesn't have the best experience there. Her popular cousin and the other students reject her because of her facial deformity, leaving her feeling like an outcast. Things begin to finally look up for Wei when her professor (Paul) asks her to become his lab assistant. She sees this as her opportunity to continue her late father’s research and fix her appearance. But what she doesn't know is that Paul has bad intentions.
When he was 17 years old, Paul became famous for making a major scientific breakthrough. He's been chasing that fame ever since, willing to do whatever it takes to reclaim his glory. That means even stealing Wei's father's research and claiming it as his own. Wei doesn't find that out until later, though.
While working in the university's lab, Wei and Paul discuss where her father went wrong in his experiment, realizing that he had failed to include a binding agent necessary to merge the skin tissue. Wei eventually discovers that the binding agent is a rare corpse flower, and she goes to collect one. After removing a section of skin from her thigh and combining all the necessary ingredients, she reattaches the skin to her thigh before injecting the substance into the area. The substance starts to take effect, and the skin begins to meld together, appearing to heal. Wei realizes the formula worked.
However, she doesn't get to stay happy for long because one of her cousin's friends, Eve, suspects that she wants Paul and confronts her about it before leaving her stranded in the middle of nowhere. Eve then calls Wei's cousin, Angela, and tells her that she needs to do something about Wei. Wei eventually finds a way back home and discovers that Angela has destroyed her father's shrine. They get into a physical altercation, which ultimately ends with Wei fatally stabbing Angela in the eye with a chopstick. This is when Wei becomes fully unhinged.
She peels off the skin from Angela's face, injects it with the mysterious substance, and then applies it to her face. The substance takes effect, and Angela's face is now grafted onto Wei’s. Now that she looks like Angela, she has to completely change her style, voice, and personality to match. While things seem to go smoothly at first, Wei soon realizes that the grafted face doesn't remain stable. She realizes this while on a date with Angela's boyfriend, Josh. As Wei is about to kiss Josh, Angela's face suddenly slips off and falls onto him. Josh panics and begins to retreat, but in his haste, he stumbles too far and falls off the cliff. Meanwhile, Paul has figured out how the skin grafting procedure works since he has Wei's father's journal.
Although Wei is able to apply Angela's face back onto hers, she knows it's not going to last long. She needs a new victim's face to use, and that victim is Eve. She finds a way to lure Eve back to her place, and after a short chase, she kills her with a drill. Wei then uses the substance again to apply Eve's face to hers. Now that she looks like Eve, Wei uses this to her advantage in an attempt to locate her father's journal at Paul's house, but she finds nothing. Later, Paul calls and asks her to come over. While at his house, Wei discovers a vial of the substance hidden in a secret compartment. She takes it and then leaves.
Back at her house, Wei peels Eve's face off her face and then starts crying. Jasmine, Angela's other friend who was nice to Wei, enters the house and consoles her. However, things go wrong when Jasmine opens the refrigerator and discovers body parts inside. In a moment of panic and desperation to keep her secrets hidden, Wei strangles Jasmine to death to protect herself. She then disposes of her body. Paul shows up at Wei's house and finds her sitting on the floor in the dark. He questions her about the vial she took, and she tells him she put it in the fridge.
As Paul opens the fridge, he sees Eve's head and other body parts. However, he doesn't have time to freak out because Wei stabs him in the neck with a needle to make him go unconscious. The next scene shows Paul lying on a chair with the skin of his neck shaved off. Wei applies a piece of skin to his neck and then injects him with a mysterious substance. However, this isn't the same substance that Wei has been using. Instead, it's the substance without the binding agent. Remember what happened to Wei's dad when he injected himself with this substance? Well, that's what happens to Paul.
As Wei tortures him even more, a neighbor walks into the house and sees everything that's going on. She then turns around and starts yelling for help. Knowing that she's going to call the cops, Wei starts collecting all her things and runs away. With the police close behind, Wei runs into the homeless man with a facial deformity who has always been kind to her. She pleads with him to hide her under his blanket to avoid being seen, and he agrees to help. However, she accidentally spills the substance containing the binding agent during the process.
Since Wei and the homeless man are close, the substance causes them to merge together in a grotesque transformation. That's her fate. Later, Wei's aunt sees her in a parking lot with a blanket over her head. As she glances at her, she notices that something is off. Wei's appearance is now disturbingly altered, her face a mixture of her own and the homeless man’s. Shocked and horrified, Wei's aunt runs away. Angela, Eve, and Jasmine's bodies are discovered, and Paul is left in critical condition. That's how Grafted comes to an end.