‘Slanted’ Review: Satirical Body Horror About Assimilation and Beauty Engages, but Never Gets Under the Skin

In his acidic 1931 satire, Black No More, the writer George Schuyler imagines a world where Black people can undergo an experimental surgery to become white. The depigmentation procedure, invented by an oily scientist, becomes extremely popular. People are eager to escape discrimination and reap the benefits of whiteness. The novel tested theories about assimilation and the color line. If everyone was of the same race, racism and its attendant violence would be eliminated, right? 

I couldn’t stop thinking of Schuyler’s novel while watching Amy Wang’s assured directorial debut Slanted. The film, which premiered at SXSW and won the narrative feature competition, has a similar premise. It follows Joan Huang (Shirley Chen of Sundance darling Didi), a Chinese-American teenager desperate to be prom queen. She lives in a kind of Anywhere, U.S.A., a surrealist version of Main Street cleverly conjured by Wang and her production designer Ying-Te Julie Chen. In this town, the prom queen has always been a white blonde with blue eyes. Their photos hang in a hallway at the high school, taunting Joan whenever she walks by. Joan’s friend Brindha (Never Have I Ever’s Maitreyi Ramakrishnan in a brief but excellent turn) thinks this could be the year to disrupt that trend, but Joan isn’t as confident. When the opportunity to become white presents itself, the ambitious teen doesn’t think twice. 

With this compelling set-up, Wang (The Brothers Sun, From Scratch), who directed and wrote the screenplay, crafts an engaging satire that flirts with body horror. She explores immigration and assimilation, meditating on how the alienation of the former makes way for the cruel realities of the latter. Slanted will inevitably draw comparisons to Coralie Fargeat’s The Substance (body horror for social issues), Mean Girls (humorous distillation of contemporary high-school culture) and Didi (earnest reflections on first- and second-generation immigrants), but Black No More is the film’s real antecedent. Similar to the protagonist of Schuyler’s novel, Joan undergoes the procedure because she believes that whiteness promises a more fortunate existence.

But whereas Schuyler upended that belief with scorched representations and pessimistic conclusions, Wang takes a gentler and sometimes more predictable approach. Slanted is blunt, but it could be more biting. The film struggles in a similar manner to many contemporary satires that want to send up and sentimentalize. 

Even if Slanted doesn’t always succeed on the level of satire, Wang is a confident director. There are a number of accomplished set pieces in the film, including one that involves salad bowls and the Plastics-esque popular kids, and she pulls committed and vulnerable performances from Chen and McKenna Grace (Young Sheldon), who plays Joan after the procedure.

Slanted starts in 2015 with a young Joan (Kristen Cui) arriving in America with her family and feeling humiliated on the first day of school. After kids make fun of her eyes and mock her lunch, Joan sees assimilation as her only path to survival. She realizes she can achieve this by becoming prom queen, a concept she discovers after spending an evening with her dad (Fang Du) at the high school where he’s a janitor. While her father mops the floors, Joan stumbles into the gym, where prom is being held. She’s immediately enthralled by the glamour of a decorated recreational space and the attention given to the crowned blonde.

Roughly seven years later, we see Joan getting ready for school. Her room is a shrine to white celebrities, from Taylor Swift to Sabrina Carpenter, and she spends mornings pinching her nose with a clothespin in an attempt to elongate it. Joan spends a lot of time online, too, and renders herself unrecognizable with layers of filters. Wang takes care to establish the routines of Joan’s world before getting to the twisted heart of this beauty horror. We see how the young woman admires her father but has no patience for her mother (Vivian Wu). We also bear witness to where she exists in her high school’s social stratification.

After Joan answers a DM from a brand called Ethnos, Slanted kicks into gear. An enticing promotional offer — they will dye your hair blonde at no charge — leads her to a medical office located in the back of a barbershop. Joan is so enamored of the results, which get her noticed by the cool kids, that she returns a few days later for the full surgery. Some of the movie’s strongest moments take place in the Ethnos clinic run by Willie (R. Keith Harris), a white man who used to be Black. He waxes poetic about the benefit of the surgery and shows the teen a series of humorous video testimonials corroborating his points. Like Dr. Crookman in Black No More, Willie insists that Joan’s life will be better.

And it is, at least for awhile. Joan, now Jo Hunt and played by Grace, attracts attention the minute she walks out of the clinic. These scenes, which confirm the immediacy of her newly gained privileges, have the same energy as early Key & Peele skits.

But the middle of Slanted lags compared to the steady energy of the beginning and the propulsive, more thriller-like pace of the end. It’s here, as Jo lives her new life, that Wang could have taken bigger risks with the humor, getting more than skin-deep about the cost of Jo’s assimilationist dreams. Jo’s new life includes a friendship with Olivia (Amelie Zilber), the most popular girl at their school, while her other relationships suffer. There are some poignant moments between Jo and her (horrified) parents as well as Brindha, who feels betrayed. But a darker turn, especially linked to Jo’s obsession with becoming prom queen, might have enlivened the film’s middle by heightening the stakes.

As the teen gets closer to the big day, she deals with unexpected side effects of the surgery. Her “old” face tries to return, causing her “new” face to sag. In order to maintain her image, Jo must literally peel bits of her skin off. Slanted edges into body horror as the teen’s anguish subsumes her. She becomes so preoccupied with hiding her molting face from the world that a new level of desperation sets in. Although Slanted doesn’t consistently commit to the same feverish urgency, it does manage to explore a vulnerable kind of heartbreak.