Slanted is a satirical body-horror drama directed by Amy Wang and starring Shirley Chen, Mckenna Grace, Vivian Wu, Amelie Zilber, and R. Keith Harris.
TL;DR: A teen literally changes her race to fit in, and everything unravels exactly how you’d expect - bold idea, strong performances (especially Vivian Wu), but it struggles to balance its message with a very familiar high school storyline.
The Premise Doesn’t Hold Back
Joan Huang (Shirley Chen) is a Chinese-American teenager chasing the usual high school checklist - popularity, acceptance, prom queen energy - but the issue is that the world she’s in doesn’t exactly reward her for being who she is.
So when a clinic called Ethnos shows up offering a full physical transformation, she takes it, no half-measures here, she wakes up white, now played by Mckenna Grace, and the film starts to pivot into something more unsettling.
From that point on, it’s all clearly trying to tackle identity, race, and the idea of “fitting in,” and to its credit, it commits, and there’s nothing quiet about a movie where the solution to social pressure is literally changing your face.
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The Clinic Is the Creepiest Idea It Barely Uses
The Ethnos clinic is one of the strongest ideas in the film, mostly because of how casually it treats something that should feel impossible. Identity is reduced to a service, something you can book, pay for, and walk out with like a new haircut.
There’s a body horror edge to that concept that the film only partially explores though, where it brushes up against something deeply unsettling, then pulls back before it can fully sink in, and you can feel the tension between wanting to be disturbing and wanting to stay accessible, and it never fully chooses one side.
Even so, the intent behind it is clear - Amy Wang isn’t just building a weird concept for the sake of it, there is some real perspective driving it.
Joan Is Hard to Fully Connect With
This is where the film starts to lose a bit of its grip, because while Joan’s choices make sense in theory, the script doesn’t give her enough depth early on to make those choices feel fully earned - she should be feeling like someone cornered by her environment, but she sometimes comes across like she’s ignoring obvious warning signs just to keep things moving.
Both actresses do what they can with the material though, and there are glimpses of something more layered there, but the writing doesn’t always support it.
Vivian Wu Walks Away With the Movie
Vivian Wu is brilliant though, and she makes everything around her feel more serious, so what starts as a familiar strict-parent role quickly becomes something much more complicated, where her reactions aren’t just simplified into neat emotional beats - there’s confusion, frustration, grief, and something quieter underneath all of it that never fully resolves, and every scene she’s in carries more weight because of that, and if the rest of the film operated on that same level, it would have been much better.
The Film at Its Best
When the movie does work well, it’s often in the quieter details rather than the bigger moments, and the score by Shirley Song plays a huge role in that, shifting gently between tones without announcing itself, and letting scenes feel slightly off even when nothing dramatic is happening, adding an undercurrent that the script doesn’t always manage on its own.
And even the transformation itself is handled with a good amount of restraint, as the film doesn’t rely on constant visual shock, so by not overplaying it, it lets the idea sit with you instead of overwhelming you, although, I would also have liked to have seen a little bit more with the body horror.
Where It Starts Falling Apart
The biggest issue is balance,because the film keeps shifting between being a sharp social commentary and a fairly standard high school drama, and those two sides don’t always work together - the high school elements feel familiar, not bad, just predictable, and they start to take up more space than they should.
That ends up pushing the more interesting parts of the story into the background - Joan’s internal experience, especially the psychological impact of literally becoming someone else, doesn’t get explored as deeply as it could have been - so the film just brings it all up, then moves on too quickly.
And at just over 100 minutes runtime, it also feels like it could have been a bit tighter, because some of the repetition in the school storyline could have been trimmed to give the stronger ideas more room to breathe.
Final Thoughts
Slanted is a film with a strong idea that doesn’t fully come together, and when it works, it’s sharp, uncomfortable, and genuinely interesting, but when it doesn’t, it falls back on something much more familiar.
It’s just a bit too uneven overall.