I walked into Slanted with curiosity and an open mind, genuinely intrigued by what I thought might be a bold, satirical take on race, identity, and belonging in the age of cosmetic extremes. The premise—a Chinese-American teenager electing to undergo an experimental ethnic modification surgery to fit in—promised something provocative, maybe even daringly surreal. Unfortunately, a film that aimed for commentary followed but got lost somewhere between disbelief and discomfort.
Shirley Chen gives a committed performance as Anna, a teenager so desperate to belong at the predominantly white high school that she consents to a science-fiction-adjacent procedure to “soften” her ethnic features. Writer-director Amy Wang tries to balance absurdity with sincerity, but the story stumbles on its own implausibility. It’s not that the themes aren’t timely—assimilation, identity erasure, internalized racism—they’re potent and authentic. But when the central narrative device feels like a dystopian metaphor pulled too far from the tether of emotional reality, the message doesn’t land. It floats awkwardly above the characters, never quite finding ground.
Mckenna Grace and Maitreyi Ramakrishnan do their best with the material they’re given, offering glimmers of warmth and confrontation in a high school ecosystem that feels more like a sketch of social tension than an actual place. Amelie Zilber appears in a role that seems designed more to illustrate a concept than to portray a human being. In fact, that’s true of much of the film: people talk about things—race, privilege, beauty standards—but rarely do they live them in ways that resonate.
Visually, Ed Wu’s cinematography is sleek and stylized, echoing the artificiality of Anna’s transformation and the curated environments she moves through. But even that polish contributes to the film’s problem—it all feels a bit too glossy, too aware of itself as a statement. I kept waiting for the characters to breathe, for the story to surprise me with nuance. Instead, I got what felt like a 110-minute TED Talk stretched into a coming-of-age allegory that never quite came of age.
There’s no doubt that Amy Wang has a voice and a vision. Slanted wants to say something important—but the message is buried beneath a premise too bizarre to believe, and too distracting to feel