Wei, the daughter of a dedicated researcher Liu, bears a congenital facial and neck defect that mirrors her father’s own struggle with a similar condition. [Liu], a scientist in China, relentlessly pursues a serum intended to grant instant regeneration of human skin, hoping to make grafts easier and more accessible. When the latest batch is tested on him, his skin grows uncontrollably, and he dies in a suffocating accident, leaving Wei with a heavy inheritance of science and sorrow.
Several years pass, and Wei is now a college student trying to continue her father’s work through his incomplete notes. Her path splits across continents when she moves to New Zealand to live with a distant aunt. There she meets his cousin Angie, a social climber whose popularity comes at the expense of Wei’s dignity. Angie and her clique—Eve and Jasmin—torment Wei and spread cruel rumors, with Jasmin showing a sliver of understanding amid the cruelty. Wei’s only real friend is John, a homeless man who has learned to see beyond appearances and offers quiet comfort in a world that has turned harsh.
Wei is taken under the wing of her chemistry professor, Paul, who recognizes that her father’s research could be the key to saving Paul’s grant-driven career. He offers her a position as a research assistant, and for a while Wei believes she can prove herself. Yet a fundamental flaw in the notes from her father blocks the new skin from binding correctly, and Paul eventually dismisses her from the lab. In desperation, Wei resorts to stealing corpse flowers from a nursery and uses their properties to fix the binding flaw, achieving a breakthrough that had eluded them both.
With her aunt often away, Angie escalates her torment of Wei, destroying a small shrine Wei kept to honor her father and ancestors. A confrontation over a broken photo frame of Wei’s father spirals into violence, and Wei, acting in self-defense and overwhelmed by fury, kills Angie by stabbing her through the eye. In a panic, she cuts off her own face, removing Angie’s, and uses the perfected serum to graft Angie’s features onto her own body.
Adopting Angie’s identity after disposing of the remains, Wei discovers that Paul has stolen her father’s notes and intends to take full credit for the work. Eve inadvertently reveals to the masquerading “Angie” that she and the professor share a sexual relationship, and Wei eliminates Eve with a power drill, then fully replaces Angie’s face with her own, including blond hair dye and colored contacts to cement the deception. As “Eve,” Wei locates the sole sample of the serum Paul possesses, though the notes themselves remain elusive. Wei also exposes Paul as a sexual predator, dealing a final blow to his career and his reputation.
Jasmin visits Wei after police uncover the body of Angie’s boyfriend, who died in the course of the investigation into Wei’s impersonation. When Jasmin discovers the frozen heads of Angie and Eve in Wei’s fridge, Wei smothers her with plastic wrap, erasing another witness. Paul confronts Wei, having deduced that she is responsible for the scandal and public disgrace. He mocks her and reveals that he plans to sell her father’s notes to a private firm for a fortune.
Wei answers with calculated deceit, telling Paul that the missing sample lies in her fridge. When he goes to verify, she paralyzes him with an injection and doses him with the same flawed batch that claimed her father’s life, watching as his skin consumes him from the inside. A noisy neighbor interrupts, alerting the authorities as Wei stands over the scene. She tries to flee, and encounters John sleeping in the subway; she asks him to hide her, but the fateful sample in her pocket shatters in the ensuing chaos.
Months pass. Wei’s aunt unexpectedly encounters a girl she mistakes for Wei, and an old homeless woman wrapped in John’s blanket surfaces in her view. The revelation is chilling: the woman is Wei, now fused with John’s decaying corpse, a final, macabre culmination of a desperate quest for identity and a science that refused to stay contained.
