Writer/director Amy Wang mixes Mean Girls and Jordan Peele-esque racial commentary to make Slanted an effective horror thriller.
Identity is a major point of contention in America. Many are all too proud to say who they are, where they come from, and what makes them so special. Sometimes (especially nowadays), that pride can be corrosive and turn to ignorance or discrimination of anyone who isn’t a full-blooded, homegrown, white American. Worse, it can cause people from different backgrounds or culture to think less of their identities and want to conform instead of express themselves. It’s an epidemic in a country that was once seen as the cultural melting pot of the world now becoming dismissive and abusive to others. Or in other words, a Slanted view of the American Dream.
It’s a dream that 17-year-old Joan (Shirley Chen) lives with every day, for better or worse. She and her Chinese family immigrated to rural Georgia when she was seven and ever since her first day of school, everything around her has told her to hate being Chinese and desperately want to be white. Her dreams of being prom queen and admiration of famous blondes with crystal skin worry her optimistic dad (Fang Du) and traditional mom (Vivian Wu). Then Joan takes a drastic step when hearing about a company Ethnos. Its trade? Experimental surgery that turns anyone into a white person.
Now Joan is Jo (Mckenna Grace), a perky blonde with flawless skin, a confident smile, and the apple of everyone’s eye. Even the high school queen bee (Amelie Zilber) sees Jo as her new best friend (or flunky, they’re interchangeable in her eyes). But as Jo gets closer to her dream, she shocks her family by revealing the shame she ties to her heritage. And that experimental surgery starts to show some nasty side effects.
Face value.
Photo Credit: Bleecker Street
The first 20 or so minutes of Slanted are worrying because writer/director Amy Wang sets up her satirical view of rural American in a way that’s a bit too on-the-nose. Joan drives through town seeing abandoned strip malls featuring gun shops and fast food joints with a main selling point of being proud to be American (get a burger at “Stripes Jr.” for instance). The halls of her high school feature numerous American flags and past prom queens that look like clones of a Love is Blind contestant. Even the joke about seeing Michael Bublé in concert “as a white person” would be tacky 15 years ago. All of it is effective, sure, but it makes you wish Wang presented it all with either some clever restraint or a bit more style.
Fortunately, Wang pulls things back when she focuses on Joan’s character arc and the relationship she has to her identity. The little slights against Joan are the things that keep picking away at her and, in turn, the audience: her white classmates ignoring her, random bystanders walking by her giving little looks of disgust, and being seen as an even bigger freak after she dyes her hair blonde. That inner turmoil is worsened when Joan’s loving parents want her to be proud to be Chinese and to be in America. Even as others look down on her dad for being a house cleaner, he still has an unwavering joy to have made it with his family in a whole new place. And the fact that Joan is shunned both when she honors her heritage AND when she tries to fit in is the knife that keeps digging in.
The white side.
And when Joan becomes Jo to show the other side of the coin, Wang twists the knife even more. She shows the cult-like nature of rural American whiteness, the shock and disappointment of Joan’s parents, and the horrifying nature of modern beauty culture in equal measure. It’s an effective way to show the audience that the horror of Joan betrayal is the central shock of Slanted. Even the jokes and satire are more effective in the second half of the movie, from the major plot twists to the simple use of salad boxes at lunch. It all leads to a pretty powerful final shot that makes a movie too blunt at the start hit hard by the end.
What saves the weaker moments of Slanted is the cast. Chen gives a fantastic performance enduring all the self-doubt and emotional damage the script puts on her. She has a bubbly personality that hurts to watch get hammered into the ground by the rude world around her, but it’s never overplayed. Props to Grace too, for carrying Chen’s deep-seated insecurities and doubts to her performance while wearing a slowly-cracking smile. Du and Wu are the joint emotional heart of the movie, always coming in at just the right moments to try to refocus Joan and save her from herself.
The bottom line.
Slanted has a message that’s been told before, but at least it has a fresher angle and is told in an effective way. Wang’s script and her cast carry the weight to make its satire hit hard at the climax. It helps that a movie about identity knows exactly what it wants to be.
Slanted is now playing in select theaters. Watch the trailer here.
Images courtesy of Bleecker Street. Read more articles by Jon Winkler here.
REVIEW RATING
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Slanted - 7/10
7/10
