Publication Date: 03-14-2026

Slanted (2026) review

Dir. Amy Wang

By: Steve Pulaski

Rating: ★½

Amy Wang’s Slanted is so off-target in its attempt to satirize a white-washed American culture and misguided in what it wants to say about the minority experience that all it can do is remind you of other, better movies. Its premise has a faint echoes of The Substance, despite the high concept and fearlessly detailed depictions of body horror. It has the hyperfeminine high school energy of Mean Girls, but none of the wit, and even if its move to create a “Sunken Place” ala Get Out lands with a deafening thud.

The story concerns Joan Huang (Shirely Chen), the daughter of Chinese immigrants, whose first days at an American school solidified her place as a social pariah who looked different and brought exotic food to lunch. Cut to high school, and she’s green with envy as she sees the pampered white, blonde bombshells of her school be rewarded with popularity and recognition at the school prom.

Her obsession with trying to appear Caucasian extends to her social media usage, where she uses filters to make her appear white, and eventually makes the jump to dye her hair blonde. Enter Ethnos, the company behind the filter she uses, who extends a personal invite to her to be a part of their two-hour procedure, in which people of color can be ethnically modified into white bodies. After deceiving her mother to signing a parental consent form, Joan Huang becomes Mckenna Grace; aka, Jo Hunt.

Slanted doesn’t come within a stone’s throw of the unfairly maligned and deceptively smart film Soul Man, which revolved around a white teenager abusing tanning pills to appear darker in skin, so he could effectively obtain a student scholarship, until he realized racial profiling was infinitely worse than being passed over for an academic privilege. The first problem is Joan isn’t adequately developed as a person. She suffers from the usual teen angst young women her age often do in movies, only this time, her sins involve not making dumplings with her mother and being embarrassed by her father’s janitorial job. When Joan becomes Jo, she befriends one of her influencer classmates (Amelie Zilber) in an attempt to win prom queen.

Wang joylessly illustrates Joan, and when she becomes Joan, there are far too many fleeting ideas that are never further developed for Slanted to leave an impact. I understand that, as a teenager, Joan’s priorities are popularity and being noticed by her (white) crush, but introducing a tech company like Ethnos prompts larger questions, such as the fact that its existence would eventually erase a significant number of elder minorities before quite possibly extinguishing the smallest minority groups all together. Wang bypasses the cultural impact of a company like Ethnos in favor of another coming-of-age story centered around beauty and status, which only adds to the derivative nature of the entire film.

Slanted flirts with camp, satire, and body horror, but seems too shy to embrace any of them. At Ethnos, a song and accompanying music video about the joys of being white is played, but it’s neither frightening nor funny. It’s just present, and it’s a half-assed regurgitation of what Jordan Peele managed to convey in Get Out. At one point, Joan plucks her hair from the follicles, resulting in blood on her hairline. Wang doesn’t have the stomach or the interest to push her Cronenbergian sensibilities any further. And as a result, by the third act, Slanted might as well be visual wallpaper lumbering to a conclusion as unsatisfying as the entire project itself, which at least makes it consistent.

Starring: Shirley Chen, Mckenna Grace, Fang Du, Maitreyi Ramakrishnan, Kristen Cui, and Amelie Zilber. Directed by: Amy Wang.