In Karyn Kusama’s 2009 high school horror comedy Jennifer’s Body, Hell is a teenage girl. In New Zealand director Sasha Rainbow’s debut feature, Grafted, a teenage girl is more like The Labyrinth from Clive Barker’s Hellraiser series, a warped, macabre dimension of gruesome torment and unwholesome delights.
The girl in Grafted is Wei (Joyena Sun), removed from her home in Anytown, China, to New Zealand, where she moves in with her blithely preoccupied auntie, Ling (Xiao Ho), and her snotty, hip cousin Angela (Jess Hong). To the assimilated Angela, Wei is anomalous; she prays at her late father’s Buddhist altar, and favors Cantonese dishes like chicken feet and char siu, signifiers of national identity that calcify Angela’s impression of her as a weirdo and worse, a foreigner.