247. SLANTED (2026) dir. Amy Wang

SLANTED is the debut of writer-director Amy Wang, about a Chinese-American teenager (Shirley Chen) who undergoes an experimental surgery in order to become white. Not like skin-bleaching white. I mean, blonde hair, blue-eyed, McKenna Grace.Joan Huang, ever since her emigration to the U.S. from China as an elementary-school-aged kid, has absorbed and subsequently lived by racial hegemony. Fair-skinned, thin blondes reign supreme. Dark-haired Chinese girls do not. Prom queens don't look like her. The artists plastered on her bedroom walls also don't look like her. Hell, her Snapchats don't even look like her, partially due to a skin-lightening filter made by Ethnos, a company who keeps sending texts praising her loyalty to said filter, offering her a chance to change her life forever.Joan can dress the part of the school's local Regina George protege Olivia (Amelie Zilber), even dye her hair the same color, but as Olivia says, in one of the movie's most scathing lines, "I can still see your black roots." Something more drastic must occur.Joan finally gives Ethnos a shot. They offer her the ability to surgically transform her body, skin tone, hair color, facial structure, all of it, in order to abandon her Chinese identity and become white.Enter Jo (McKenna Grace). She looks like the ideal Joan's always searched for. On the street, she turns heads, elicits the warmest, friendliest smiles. Joan is now beloved, at the expense of the body and face she's always known.And as one can expect from a body horror movie, the MONKEY'S PAW of it all eventually rears its head but what I think allows SLANTED to stand apart from its most-often pitched combination of THE SUBSTANCE & MEAN GIRLS is the length of time by which I learn about Joan Huang. I meet her hard-working dad (Fang Du) who's more optimistic about adopting Americanisms than her mom (Vivian Wu). The movie reveals how racial hegemonies, contradictions and all, are adopted into the psyches of immigrant children. Joan doesn't see this rejection of her Chinese self in service of the benefits of assimilation as anything other than normal. To her, a surgery that rips her hair out of her scalp and cracks her jaw/orbital bones into a mold of a different genetic makeup is merely the logical path forward. She wants to be prom queen, right? Exalted, loved, adored? Like we all do. The roots of this self-hatred run deep and as a result, craft a portrait of someone with little stability regarding her own identity. It's already tough to be a teenager but Joan thinks she has no other recourse. Hell is the body of a teenage girl rejected and judged by the world.SLANTED is now playing, only in theaters.---Music provided Content ID free by @goodkidbandFollow The Movies on ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠Instagram⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠ & ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠Letterboxd⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠Throw a couple dollars in the ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠tip jar!⁠