Slanted review: body horror meets racism in prom queen satire

In Coralie Fargeat’s stupendously successful body horror The Substance, there’s a striking sequence in which Demi Moore’s dethroned aerobics show presenter Elisabeth Sparkle is confronted by a framed image of her younger, usurping self, Sue (Margaret Qualley).

It plays out in a disorienting hallway, glaring with the burnt amber hue favoured by the 80s, featuring a carpet like the one from The Shining’s Overlook Hotel. A place once adorned with her Amazonian portraits in lycra.

This taunting walk of shame sprung to mind when watching Australian filmmaker Amy Wang’s Slanted.

We first meet Joan Huang as a young, pig-tailed girl (Kristen Cui) freshly arrived from China and alighting in an Edward Scissorhands-style white picket fence town of indistinct locale.

Surface-level utopian, it’s seething with barely restrained racism under the surface. A Get Out-recalling menace Joan feels in her bones even before settling into her new class, where she’s immediately confronted by a brat of a boy using his fingers to raise the corners of his eyes in a hideous, heartbreaking slur.

Reluctant to confide in her parents, Joan feels suffocated by her well-meaning but overbearing mum (Vivian Wu), retreating instead into the comfort of her goofy father (Fang Du), a cleaner. Opting to spend the night with him at work, Joan stumbles into the high school gym transformed for prom.

The entrance is lined with towering blondes beaming down at her, photographs of former prom queens with no room for people of colour.

Pushing on and into the heart of dance, Joan’s bedazzled by the shimmer of disco balls as the rot of supposed white supremacy sets in.

Slanted: face-off

It’s a strong start that only strengthens when Cui hands over the role of Joan to Dìdi star Shirley Chen. A brilliant performer who deserves to be front and centre, she must make do with a supporting role here, too.

Slanted comes alive in her hands. Approaching the end game of high school, she has her sights set on scoring the prom queen’s crown, especially after assumed queen bee Olivia (Amelie Zilber), an incessant Instagram influencer, rules herself out because of a film gig.

While anyone enamoured with the pantheon of teen movies, including Mean Girls and Clueless, will know where we’re going, Chen takes the familiar beats and makes them her own, with Joan’s assured outsider confidence nonetheless scarred by those early experiences.

Her determination to become the school’s first prom queen of colour frustrates best mate, Brindha, played by Canadian actor Maitreyi Ramakrishnan of Never Have I Ever fame. Easily Slanted’s best player, her abundant energy bounces off Chen in a way that leaves you wishing we could stay in their geeks-against-the-world company.

Instead, we’re ushered into a speculative fiction owing more to criminally underseen Australian teen drama Pulse than it does The Substance. Directed by Stevie Cruz-Martin, Pulse is written by and stars actor and hemiplegic person Daniel Monks as a young gay man who pursues radical surgery to become a non-disabled woman in a tragic attempt to feel more loved at the cost of erasing his identity.

Joan does likewise, when her overuse of an icky Instagram filter to make her features appear Caucasian sees her preyed upon by eugenicist outfit Ethnos. Fronted by unnervingly grinning guru Willie (R. Keith Harris), he reveals he was once Black but underwent the knife to achieve whiteness, in what he deems ‘True equality’.

In other words, entrenching an odious Aryan ideology pushed by jack-booted neo-Nazis the world over, plastered over with a thin veneer of jolly United Colours of Benetton advert-like ditties through which Wang blowtorches white privilege with sick burns. 

Enticing Joan with the gateway drug of silken blonde locks to replace her frazzled dye job, in the film’s goriest though light-on sequence, she’s determined to blend in with Olivia’s synchronised salad-eating gang. Soon, she’s hoodwinking her mum into signing the surgery consent form and has a brand-new face to show for it.

Slanted: close to home

Slanted slackens exactly when Wang’s SXSW Grand Jury Award-winning feature should come into its own. With Joan now portrayed by The Handmaid’s Tale guest star Mckenna Grace, adopting the name Jo Hunt, it’s unfortunate that her performance isn’t as strong as Chen’s just when the out-there plot twist requires satirical rigour.

It’s left for Wu and Du to do the heavy lifting, as her horrified parents are at first frightened by this random white girl letting herself into their home, then horrified when they eventually grasp this Mandarin-speaking intruder is their daughter, who has chosen to walk away from everything that makes their family unique.

Wang could have made more of their pain, with the film instead getting bogged down in an uninteresting subplot involving a snooty rich mum whose house her dad cleans that doesn’t quite cut the mustard on the class commentary front.

While it’s thematically en pointe for Joan to push loyal bestie Brindha aside, it’s unfortunate that this sidelines Ramakrishnan’s electric screen presence. Joan’s determination to be one of Olivia’s Plastics results in a too-woolly attempt at unravelling the bitchy influencer’s deal. And while the body horror element, with Joan’s new face beginning to peel and then sag, leads to a dark-as finale, the road there is plot-holed.

Wang has a talent for witty dialogue that shines through Chen and Ramakrishnan, confidently directing the film’s family and friends dynamics. But Slanted is neither as nuanced as Dìdi nor as wild as LA-based New Zealander Sasha Rainbow’s similarly themed Grafted.

Would it be sharper had Wang set it in Sydney? Adopting the US, alongside Michael Shanks’ fellow Sydney Film Festival offering Together, airbrushes out some of that lived experience specificity that strengthens storytelling.

Slanted is enjoyable enough, but the stakes never live up to the heightened angle in tackling the warping face of internalised racism.

Slanted is showing as part of the 2025 Sydney Film Festival. It goes on general release on 1 July 2025 in Australia.

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