Review: 'Slanted' is a body-horror thriller with some shocks and a painfully obvious message about race and assimilation
First-time writer-director Amy Wang has some good ideas floating around “Slanted,” a body-horror drama about race and assimilation taken to the extreme. One wishes Wang had gotten a couple movies under her belt before biting off so much here.
Joan Huang is a first-generation Chinese-American girl, having arrived in the States with her parents, Roger (Fang Du) and Sofia (Vivian Wu), when she was 7. Now 17 (and played as a teen by Shirley Chen), Joan is obsessed with being the all-American girl — personified in the pursuit of becoming her school’s prom queen.
When the odds-on favorite for prom queen, Olivia Hammond (Amelie Zilber), drops out because she’s landed a role in a TV show, Joan sees her opportunity — and even bleaches her black hair blonde to try to impress Olivia’s circle of friends. Olivia, who’s not above using Joan to get discounts at a Chinese-run nail salon, isn’t buying it. “I can see your black roots. Ew,” Olivia tells her dismissively.
That’s when Joan walks into Ethnos Inc., a storefront that offers a unique medical service: Making anyone of color look and sound white. “If you can’t beat ‘em, be them,” intones Dr. Willie Singer (R. Keith Harris), who tells Joan that he used to be Black before inventing the process. (The premise sounds like a variation on a “Saturday Night Live” sketch from the ‘80s, when Eddie Murphy put on makeup to appear white, and learned that without Black people around, white folks give each other stuff for free.)
Without getting into too many spoilers, Joan takes the Ethnos treatment — and soon everyone at school see a new student, Jo Hunt (played by McKenna Grace).
Wang’s story plays like an old “Twilight Zone” morality tale, or a grotesque mash-up of “Mean Girls” and “The Substance.” The pacing is slack, however, and the dialogue — like when Joan’s parents see what she’s done to herself — is trite and obvious. And the third-act reveal, when Joan/Jo realizes something’s gone wrong with the treatment, doesn’t hit as hard as it could.
Watching “Slanted,” I wondered what a director like Jordan Peele might have done with it — applying some subtlety and sly wit to Joan’s rejection of her Chinese identity in order to fit in with white America, and discovering how shallow that pursuit is. But one sees in Wang’s flawed film the potential for something more biting on her next film.
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‘Slanted’
★★1/2
Opens Friday, March 13, in theaters everywhere. Rated R for language, some sexual material, teen drug use and brief violent content/bloody images. Running time: 104 minutes; in English and in Mandarin with subtitles.