In March 2021, six Asian women were killed in a mass shooting in Atlanta. Amy Wang, an Asian Australian writer and director, who emigrated to America in 2015, remembers that tragedy well. \u201cIt was the first time I felt genuinely unsafe here,\u201d she says. Alongside a growing fear, childhood memories resurfaced \u2013 the internal and external racism and the exhaustion of never quite fitting in. \u201cI moved to Australia when I was seven and didn\u2019t speak English \u2013 it was a tough time for me,\u201d she admits. And then there was one particular recurring thought. \u201cThere were many times when I\u2019d wake up as a teenager and think to myself: \u2018Wouldn\u2019t life be easier if I were white?\u2019\u201d So, she turned that past feeling into art.<\/p>\n
The art is Slanted, Wang\u2019s audacious feature debut \u2013 a film whose premise is, by design, completely unhinged. An insecure Asian American high schooler undergoes a procedure at a mysterious cosmetics clinic called Ethnos (tagline: if you can\u2019t beat them \u2026 be them) that renders people of colour visibly white, permanently. It\u2019s taking \u2018I don\u2019t see colour\u2019 to the ultra-extreme: equality achieved only when we all look the same, and that means whiteness. The surgery works. And then things get complicated.<\/p>\n
Winner of the 2025 narrative feature grand jury prize at SXSW, Slanted blends dark satire, body horror and coming-of-age drama. Its unsubtlety is a feature, creating space to contemplate societal power dynamics, the immigrant experience, race and body image without ever feeling like a lecture.<\/p>\n
\u201cHonestly, I didn\u2019t think the film would be controversial, because it\u2019s so truthful to me; the core of how I felt as a teenager,\u201d explains Wang. We are speaking via Zoom from her New York hotel room overlooking Central Park, mid-press tour.<\/p>\n<\/p>\n
Joan, played by Didi\u2019s Shirley Chen, has memorised the social architecture of her high school and knows exactly where she falls within it: outside. She idolises the popular girls \u2013 their easy confidence, their proximity to the all-American ideal crystallised in the prom queen crown. When Ethnos messages her with the promise of transformation, the temptation is irresistible. Post-surgery, Joan becomes Jo, played by Scream 7\u2019s McKenna Grace, and life appears effortless, but at what cost?<\/p>\n
\u201cThe core concept was satirical, but I couldn\u2019t imagine it as a dramatic satire,\u201d Wang explains. \u201cI wanted the movie to feel like Mean Girls at the beginning and then kind of feel like a nightmare. How do I evoke that? Well, through body horror.\u201d She adds, with comic timing: \u201cThe concept was years before The Substance came out, I\u2019d like to say.\u201d While both films weaponise transformation as metaphor, Slanted operates at the edge of body horror \u2013 less viscerally savage, more interested in the quiet familial damage that follows.<\/p>\n
The genre-mixing occasionally wobbles for that reason \u2013 it could bite harder. Yet the film\u2019s most affecting scenes are grounded in Wang\u2019s memories. \u201cI had a wealth of experiences to draw from, particularly the scenes with Jo\/Joan and her parents,\u201d played by Fang Du and Vivian Wu. The comedy of cross-cultural misunderstanding shades into something more painful: parents who sacrificed everything in a new country, and their daughter is literally trying to disappear into it.<\/p>\n
Setting the story in high school was both instinctive and strategic. The social world of adolescence gives the film\u2019s more absurdist moments believability. \u201cWhen you\u2019re in high school, everything feels so heightened and dramatic,\u201d Wang says. \u201cI wanted to take the all-American girl trope, so well-known, so coveted, and flip it on its head.\u201d<\/p>\n
Grace, while not Asian-American, found her own way into the character. \u201cShe related to the bullying, the feeling of wanting to belong,\u201d says Wang. \u201cShe even embraced the Mandarin. She was on Duolingo and would send me videos of herself practising.\u201d<\/p>\n
Photograph: Bleecker Street<\/p>\n
It\u2019s an improvised line from Never Have I Ever\u2019s Maitreyi Ramakrishnan, playing Joan\u2019s friend, that lingers longest \u2013 \u201cDo you think I\u2019m ugly too?\u201d \u2013 a reminder that you can occupy the same world as another person of colour and have entirely different realities. Wang recalls a response from KCRW podcast host Sam Sanders, who told her that watching Slanted made him ask whether he would have taken the surgery as a teenager. Probably not \u2013 but he would have had surgery to become straight. \u201cTo me, that\u2019s the whole film,\u201d says Wang. \u201cIt\u2019s about confronting what you\u2019re uncomfortable with and putting it on the surface \u2013 it could be your body, your face, something internal. I don\u2019t believe anyone has existed in this world without once thinking: \u2018I wish I looked different.\u2019\u201d<\/p>\n
Wang has been part of Hollywood since graduating from AFI in 2017, producing Netflix\u2019s The Brothers Sun and writing on the forthcoming Crazy Rich Asians 2, which she describes as more joyous and aspirational. Slanted is the necessary flip side: not the triumph of representation, but the cost of its absence.<\/p>\n
She has lived in the US for over a decade. What still surprises her? She barely pauses. \u201cThat drug advertisements and billboards list all the side effects. I will never get used to that.\u201d Somehow, it\u2019s the most American thing she can think of.<\/p>\n
America is home for now, and she\u2019s proud of her Asian and Australian-ness, particularly when far away from home turf. Adopting a \u201cwho cares\u201d attitude that only comes with age, she notes, \u201cit really is a lifelong journey \u2013 finding the specific version of yourself that fits, that you can be proud of. I\u2019m embracing that.\u201d For Wang, Slanted is a reclamation of her past self. \u201cI hope to keep making movies that confront and explore the why, and in doing so, help somebody else feel seen and feel less judged.\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"In March 2021, six Asian women were killed in a mass shooting in Atlanta. Amy Wang, an Asian…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":533576,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[27],"tags":[49,48,75,337],"class_list":["post-533575","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-movies","tag-ca","tag-canada","tag-entertainment","tag-movies"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/533575","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=533575"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/533575\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/533576"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=533575"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=533575"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=533575"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}