Grafted

The Creeping Flesh

Because Steven Soderbergh’s Presence is screening Wednesday evening, our review will go up Friday. In the meantime, here is this week’s other new horror release.

Two things occurred to me while watching Grafted. First, that this was some nightmare version of Valley Girl (1983). And second, that this was the David Cronenberg movie David Cronenberg never made — perhaps because unlike writer-director Sasha Rainbow, he was at no time in his life a teenaged girl. Take my or any other woman’s word for it: That experience is a very special type of body-horror for anyone who isn’t an exact fit for whatever happens to be the “in” shape / color / weight-height proportions of her day. I get that men have their own set of body-image neuroses. That having been said — sorry, cis-het dudes — you have no idea how tough it is to be a girl, what with the mixed messages, the shifting criteria for hotness, the slut-shaming, the dude bets and the Stygian river of “is she hot / a cock-teaser / a spinster-in-the-making / refreshingly liberated / a whore?”

So, with that out of the way: Wei (Mohan Liu) is essentially a slightly older variation on Stephen King’s Carrie White — the girl who’s more challenged than her fellow students because she’s doing her best to keep her miserable home life a secret so that her classmates will accept her … and failing dismally at this because mean girls rule high school as top-of-the-food chain predators with a laser-sharp sense for weaknesses.