‘Slanted’ Review

There is a moment in Amy Wang's debut feature, Slanted, when the absurdity of the premise stops feeling absurd at all. That is when you know the film has done its job. The setup, on paper, sounds like provocation for provocation's sake: a Chinese American high school girl named Joan Huang undergoes experimental surgery to become white so she can win prom queen. But Wang, who reportedly conceived the idea in 2020 during the surge of anti-Asian hate crimes, is not interested in shock value for its own sake. She is interested in the truth underneath the grotesque, and that truth lands like a fist.

Slanted is blunt satire with sharp teeth. Wang earns every bit of its wild, unsubtle energy because she is clearly in on the joke while also being the joke's author. This is a filmmaker who trusts her own vision completely, and the result is a film that feels simultaneously like a debut full of raw nerve and a statement of intent from someone who has been waiting a long time to say something.

The comparisons to The Substance are coming and they are largely beside the point. Both films deal in bodies, transformation, and the violence women inflict on themselves chasing an impossible standard. But where Coralie Fargeat's film is a meditation on aging and visibility, Wang is drilling into something altogether different: assimilation, alienation, and the delusions that kids of color construct when they feel they have no community to belong to. These are not the same film. They are not even asking the same questions. Slanted deserves to be received on its own terms.

Shirley Chen, who broke hearts playing the emo older sister in Dìdi, is extraordinary here. She brings a quality to Joan that never tips into caricature, even as the world around her flirts constantly with it. Joan is insecure without being pathetic, desperate without being unsympathetic. Chen finds the precise frequency of a teenager who has internalized so many contradictions about her own worth that she has started to believe the only solution is erasure. When Mckenna Grace steps in as the post-surgery Jo Hunt, the film finds its most unsettling gear. The two performers and their characters exist in a kind of grotesque harmony, and together they pour so many complicated, thorny, intrusive thoughts into one beautifully grotesque body horror dark comedy that it is hard to look away.

The screenplay does not pretend to be subtle and that is the correct choice. Some critics will reach for the word "sledgehammer" as though it is a criticism. It is not. Wang is working in a register where subtlety would be a betrayal. The entire premise is a sledgehammer. The names of the businesses in the background are a sledgehammer. The school mascot is a sledgehammer. The gradually shifting aspect ratios are a sledgehammer. Every one of these details is deliberate, layered, and worth the attention of a keen eye. The film rewards close watching even as it is loudly, confidently entertaining at its most surface level.

What gives Slanted its unexpected emotional weight is the family at its center. The Huang family dynamics carry a specificity and tenderness that the broader satire sometimes threatens to swallow but never quite does. These are people caught between worlds, not just Joan. Her parents carry their own quiet negotiations with assimilation, their own calculations about what survival requires. The body horror, when it arrives in full, earns its horror precisely because we understand what Joan has already sacrificed before the surgery ever happens.

The film is not perfect. The pacing in the first act tests patience before the transformation kicks the story into its second gear. The structural logic around a key rival character contains a gap that the script never quite closes, leaving one narrative thread hanging in a way that slightly undermines the internal consistency of Joan's journey. And there are moments where the film's ambitions, which are genuinely large, bump up against the limits of what a debut feature can contain. The body horror, in particular, could have gone further. There is a version of this film that pushes harder into physical dread and comes out the other side even more ferocious.

But Wang's shortcomings here come from the same place as her strengths: she is swinging at big ideas, and sometimes the swing is wider than the frame. That is a problem worth having. Slanted is reaching for something culturally incisive and largely finding it. The film understands that the cruelest trick white supremacy plays is convincing people of color that the problem is their skin and not the system. It understands that assimilation is not freedom but a different kind of captivity. And it understands, perhaps most painfully, that a teenager who has never been given a community to belong to will construct the most devastating fantasies about what belonging might cost.

Maitreyi Ramakrishnan, as Joan's best friend, provides the film with its sharpest counterpoint: two girls with the same experiences, arriving at entirely different conclusions, neither entirely right or wrong. That tension is where Slanted is at its most sophisticated, and Ramakrishnan plays it with a precision that lingers.

Amy Wang won the best film award at SXSW, and it is easy to see why. Slanted is the kind of debut that announces a filmmaker with a distinctive voice and something genuine to say. It is funny, poignant, uncomfortable, and occasionally brilliant. It is also, at its best, the rare kind of satire that does not just hold a mirror up to society but twists the mirror until the reflection looks monstrous because the original was monstrous all along.

Whatever Amy Wang makes next, the room will be paying attention.

Slanted releases in Theaters on March 13, 2026.