SXSW '25: Slanted

All Joan Huang wants is to fit in. Moving from China to a nondescript American town as a child, she suffers racist insults from the white kids in her classroom; as a teenager, she pinches her nose and uses Instagram filters to look more like her corn-fed, blue-eyed peers, and maybe win the coveted all-American title of her high school’s prom queen.

Director Amy Wang takes a familiar premise to an absurd conclusion in her feature debut Slanted, which premiered and won a jury prize at the 2025 SXSW Film Festival. When visiting her dad at his janitorial job at the local high school, 6-year-old Joan walks into the gym as that year’s prom queen is announced. She can’t take her eyes off of the modern Aryan princess being crowned. It’s an image that sticks with her a decade later, but when she enters the running for her grade’s prom queen, she realizes she’s just not white enough to win, even with all the bleach blonde box dye in the world. So when Ethnos, the company behind that Instagram filter she uses, slides into her DMs with a mysterious offer, she takes it.

As Joan, Shirley Chen (Didi, Quiz Lady) is completely believable, an awkward-in-her-own-skin teen addicted to her phone. She’s close to her dad but resentful of her mother’s attempts at bonding and circling the orbit of Queen Bee Olivia (Amelie Zilber), whose recent casting in a movie prevents her from entering into the prom queen race. Joan’s willingness to throw her identity under the bus is in full force as we get to know her. When an experiment with bleach blonde dye wins her an invite to a nail appointment with Olivia and her Mean Girls squad, she ditches plans to make dumplings with her mom and willingly acts as a translator with the Chinese manicurist to get a Hangzhou locals discount for these white girls. 

Wang skillfully sets the stage for Joan’s decision to undergo life-altering surgery, mixing up typical teenage rashness with her existential despair at her lot in life. All it takes is one meet-and-greet with the founder of Ethnos, and some videos from happy clients who’ve gone from various races to white, and Joan’s convinced. With a signature from her mom—who thinks she’s signing a field trip form—Joan’s under the needle, and Slanted jumps into high gear.

Post-surgery, white Joan is played by McKenna Grace, and this change in perspective as the world widens around her is niftily mirrored by a shift from a 4:3 to widescreen aspect ratio. Grace excels in this admittedly tough role: she’s at first as overeager self-conscious as the original Joan, still sinking into the background and pinching her nose smaller, making it easy to see white Joan (now Jo Hunt) as the same character.

As a dramedy, Slanted stumbles when it leans into pure humor. Scenes of small-town businesses with names like “Prayers & Ammunition,” or the giant floor-to-ceiling photos of past prom queens and kings (all white, blonde, etc.) in a school hallway, are maybe funny once but not on the second or third showings. As Joan’s anesthetized for the surgery we cut to a made-for-the-movie music video and song, “Proud to Be White,” that’s just a little too on-the-nose. These parodies of white American culture seem better fit for an SNL skit and grate against the sharper satire of the movie.

But these missteps in comedy are forgiven for the emotional undercurrent that carries the movie. Jo’s rise to popularity dovetails with the decline of Joan’s relationships: Vivian Wu and Fang Du are heartbreaking in their portrayal of her parents’ grief at what they see as the loss of their daughter, hearkening back at earlier moments in the movie when her dad tells her she has her grandmother’s eyes and her mother says she looks just like her dad. When her friend Brindha (Maitreyi Ramakrishnan, essentially playing an edgier version of her Never Have I Ever character) realizes what happened, she asks Jo/Joan if she thinks she’s ugly. And that undercurrent of resentment Joan harbored toward her mother, rooted in her aversion to being Chinese American instead of what she sees as just American (aka, White) American, gains even more importance after her surgery.

Slanted does well to avoid the pitfall of many modern satires by avoiding an explicit morality tale or an ending that ties everything up with a bow and a preachy monologue. Instead, Wang trusts her audience enough to let Joan’s character arc speak for itself: from idol worship and desires to assimilate to an understanding of the importance of her heritage and recognition of how being Chinese and American is not a flaw but a strength.

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