Amy Wang’s feature directorial debut opens with a dare disguised as a coming-of-age premise: what if a teenager could surgically become the thing that’s been rejecting her? Joan Huang (Shirley Chen) is a senior at a mostly white suburban high school, the daughter of Chinese immigrant parents, and a girl who has decided — quietly, then desperately — that the only way to win is to disappear into someone else’s skin. When an experimental “racial transformation” procedure promises exactly that, Joan takes the leap, emerging on the other side as Jo Hunt (Mckenna Grace), a blonde, blue-eyed vision of the popularity she’s always been denied.
It’s a premise that could have collapsed under its own provocation, and for stretches, “Slanted” wobbles right up to that edge. But Wang, working from her own script and clearly mining personal history, isn’t interested in shock for its own sake. She wants the procedure to function the way body horror always has at its best — as metaphor made literal, discomfort made visible.
What Works: The Body as Battleground
The film’s strongest stretch is the transformation itself and its immediate aftermath. Cinematographer Ed Wu shifts the frame in ways that register in the gut before the brain catches up — a tightened aspect ratio, a color palette that curdles from teenage pastel into something more clinical, more wrong. Grace, tasked with playing a character who is Joan wearing a stranger’s face, finds an unsettling physical vocabulary: a girl relearning how to occupy a body that was built for someone else’s comfort, not hers.
The supporting cast does a lot of quiet, necessary work. Maitreyi Ramakrishnan brings warmth and a barely-concealed hurt to Joan’s best friend, left behind by the transformation in more ways than one. Vivian Wu, as Joan’s mother, carries some of the film’s most affecting moments without raising her voice — the immigrant-parent anguish of watching a child try to erase the very lineage you sacrificed to give her. And there’s a sharp vein of comedy running underneath it all, particularly in how the film skewers the performative allyship of Joan’s new social circle, the wannabes and status-philanthropists who treat identity like a costume change.
Wang clearly understands satire’s first rule: the joke has to hurt somebody, ideally the audience. When it lands — and it does, repeatedly, in the film’s first two acts — “Slanted” earns comparisons to “The Substance” and “Get Out” that the marketing has been chasing.
What Doesn’t: A Second Act That Loses Its Nerve
Where the film stumbles is in sustaining the tension of its own idea. The second act, which should be tightening the screws, instead starts circling — repeating beats of Joan/Jo’s alienation without escalating them, as though Wang is more comfortable diagnosing the wound than deciding how deep it goes. The satire, so pointed in its early targets, gets diffuse when it reaches for broader statements about whiteness and American belonging; the film gestures at ideas about assimilation and self-worth that it doesn’t have the runway left to fully cash out.
That runway problem becomes most apparent at the prom-set climax, the genre-mandated collision point that horror fans will be primed for after two acts of mounting dread. Without spoiling specifics: the film pulls back from where its own internal logic seems to be pointing. It’s the kind of ending that opts for emotional resolution over the harder, stranger conclusion the premise was building toward — closer in spirit to a film that sends its protagonist home restored than one willing to sit in the wreckage it created. For a movie that spends ninety minutes insisting that this kind of self-erasure has consequences, the last ten minutes feel oddly eager to smooth them over.
The Verdict
“Slanted” is a debut with more ideas than it knows how to fully execute, but that’s a far more interesting problem than having no ideas at all. Chen and Grace, playing two halves of the same fracturing person, both understand the assignment even when the script around them loses focus. Wang has a genuine eye — for composition, for the specific humiliations of teenage social hierarchy, for the way body horror can externalize an ache that’s usually kept private — and when “Slanted” is firing on all three of its stated registers (satire, drama, horror), it’s genuinely unlike anything else in theaters this year.
It doesn’t fully stick the landing. But it’s a film that will linger in the same way a bad prom night lingers: awkwardly, uncomfortably, and longer than you expected.
Recommended for: Fans of “The Substance,” body horror with something on its mind, and anyone who wants to see a genre debut swing hard even when it doesn’t connect on every punch.
Have you seen “Slanted”? Let me know in the comments whether you think the ending betrays the film’s own premise, or whether you read it differently.
RATING: 3/5
You can watch on:
- Amazon
- Paramount+