Synopsis: Joan Huang, a Chinese-American high schooler, undergoes ethnic modification surgery to appear white in hopes of being voted prom queen. After the surgery, her life is upended by her new appearance.
Stars: Shirley Chen, Mckenna Grace, Vivian Wu, Maitreyi Ramakrishnan, Amelie Zilber, Fang Du, Elaine Hendrix, R. Keith Harris
Director: Amy Wang
Rated: R
Running Length: 102 minutes
Movie Review in Brief: Vivian Wu gives the best performance in a film that doesn’t quite deserve her, and Slanted‘s sharp premise keeps splitting its own attention. Ambitious, flawed, and worth a look — mostly for the parts that work rather than the whole.
Review:
Body horror has always been the genre most willing to say the uncomfortable thing out loud. At its best — The Fly, Titane, The Substance — it uses transformation as a scalpel: peel back the skin and there is something true underneath about identity, fear, and what society demands from us. Slanted, Amy Wang‘s debut feature, has all the ingredients for that kind of impact.
A Film Born From a Wound
Wang’s directorial debut is deeply personal. A Chinese-Australian writer who previously produced The Brothers Sun for Netflix, she developed Slanted in the aftermath of the 2021 Atlanta spa shootings — a catalyst that brought her back to her own teenage experiences with racism in Sydney, where she grew up feeling that no matter how thoroughly she shed her Chinese identity, her face would always give her away.
That origin story is important context for the film. Slanted is not a genre exercise. It is a wound that Wang turned into a movie. The premise reflects that: Joan Huang (Shirley Chen, Didi) is a Chinese-American high schooler who idolizes the popular crowd and dreams of being prom queen. Problem: every queen in the portraits lining her school’s hallway looks nothing like her. Enter Ethnos, a mysterious cosmetic surgery clinic operating out of a junky strip mall, offering ethnic modification surgery. Joan goes under. Joan wakes up blonde and white (and played by a different actress). Everything starts to go wrong in ways the marketing doesn’t fully hint at.
Wang is tackling something real and urgent. The film’s premise asks hard questions about beauty standards, racial identity, and the cost of wanting to be seen as acceptable by people who have built the definition of acceptable around their own reflection. That conversation is worth having, and Slanted gestures toward it with real ambition.
The trouble is that most of the film operates in a more familiar register — the Heathers/Mean Girls high school social ladder framework — and it never quite reconciles those two versions of itself. Wang has cited The Farewell, Minari, and Ruben Ostlund’s films as touchstones alongside Mean Girls, and that range of tonal ambition is both the film’s greatest strength and its central structural problem.
The Performance Problem
Chen is handed a structurally difficult job: establish Joan convincingly enough that when Mckenna Grace (Scream 7) takes over the character post-surgery, the audience carries an emotional investment into the second half. The problem is that the script does not give Chen enough to work with.
Joan as written is not a teenager resisting her parents or misreading social dynamics — she is someone actively making choices that undermine her own wellbeing, ignoring the people who care about her, and treating her best friend Brindha (Maitreyi Ramakrishnan, Turning Red) as disposable. Without a visible interior life that explains the pull toward conformity, Joan reads more as self-destructive than sympathetic.
It is worth noting that Chen is a Harvard graduate and an instinctive, physically present performer — the limitations here are on the page, not in her work. Grace steps in and does what she can, moving Joan into something more recognizably sympathetic. But Wang’s script still leaves her hemmed in.
The character who starts to run away with the film is Olivia Hammond (Amelie Zilber), the HBIC whose facade has more cracks in it than her social performance suggests. Zilber is sharp and specific, and Slanted genuinely comes alive in her scenes. Wang has noted that she cast Zilber partly for her comedy instincts — she could be funny and sincere simultaneously, which is exactly what the back half of the film needs.
Where Slanted Finally Comes Into Focus
The real revelation is veteran performer Vivian Wu as Joan’s mother Sofia. The character is positioned early on as the standard disapproving immigrant parent — Joan’s “bad guy” by default. What Wu does with the film’s second and third acts is staggering. Wu plays every stage of Sofia’s journey — confusion, grief, the slow recalibration of what her daughter’s choice means for how her daughter sees her — like a person, not a dramatic function. Her performance alone makes Slanted worth watching once. She is that good.
Wang drew the parents directly from her own family, and that specificity shows. Sofia wants to preserve her Chinese heritage at all costs; husband Roger (Fang Du, The Assistant) has spent years trying to assimilate as fully as possible. The tension between them is not a conflict — it is a marriage. Their daughter’s transformation affects both of them differently, and watching each of them reckon with it is the most fully realized drama in the film.
Score, Craft, and Effects Worth Mentioning
Composer Shirley Song — a Chinese-Australian musician whose credits include several Pixar and Netflix projects — does excellent work creating a score that code-switches with the film’s tonal ambitions. Dreamy and seductive during Joan’s first visit to the Ethnos clinic, sharp and dissonant when Jo starts to notice that something is deeply wrong with her new face. It is a score that understands the film better than the film sometimes understands itself.
Cinematographer Ed Wu keeps things workmanlike, though production designer Ying-Te Julie Chen has real instincts for the class distinctions the story needs. The difference between the living rooms of Joan’s family and Olivia’s lands with the right kind of discomfort. Costume designer Michelle J. Li, the youngest Broadway costume designer working at just 27 years old, does precise work charting the visual differences between Joan’s two identities.
Editor Ryan Chan — who has cut nine Robert Zemeckis films, including Welcome to Marwen — brings a steady hand to material that constantly risks tonally whiplashing the audience. The special effects and makeup team, led by makeup effects designers Bill Johnson and Todd Watson with department head Sarah Graalman, do impressive work throughout, including a practical illusion near the conclusion that is a smart riff on the film’s own poster.
Too Long, But Not Without Promise
At 102 minutes, Slanted runs longer than it needs to. The extended conclusion gives Zilber more room and that is welcome, but the film would hit harder trimmed by fifteen minutes. Some of Wang’s most interesting thematic moves — the question of what the mind does when the face it sees in the mirror no longer matches the one it remembers — get compressed to make room for high school drama mechanics that are already familiar.
Wang is asking the right questions. The film earns its topical credit. It just does not always earn the time it spends getting there. Shirley Song’s score, Wu’s performance, and Zilber’s late-film takeover make Slanted a qualified recommendation for fans of body horror and social satire — particularly those patient enough to let the good parts compensate for the frustrating ones.
Winner of the SXSW Narrative Grand Jury Prize, Slanted is a debut that festival audiences clearly connected with. I understand why. The ambition is real, and Wang is a filmmaker worth watching. What lingers most is how easily the film blurs the line between who we are on the surface and who we’re trying to be underneath.
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