Slanted Is A Movie About Wanting To Change Your Race & It Feels Eerily Familiar To My Childhood

By the time I was five, I knew I didn’t quite fit in. I grew up in rural Australia, the child of an Indian/Fijian mother and a white Austrian father, in a predominantly white town, where not a single person I knew looked like me. So much so, I hardly even resembled my own parents, who were so genetically different from each other that the blending of the two left me looking like no one. I existed in an in-between that, at times, made me feel like there was not a single place I would ever truly belong. This obvious physical difference did not pair well with my chronic people-pleasing, because I had always wanted — desperately — to fit in. In doing so, I was willing to sand down all the ethnic parts of myself until I was palatable and as white-facing as I could possibly be. 

The obsession started small: an idolisation of Barbie when I was three, then Cloe from the Bratz dolls (the blonde one, of course). I loved Indian food, secretly, but never ate it in front of my friends because of its strong aromatic smell that made white children squirmish. Then it grew into something more deliberate, avoiding anything that might confirm any Indian stereotype; revelling in my inability to do maths or cook; I was loud; I worked in The Arts and had a penchant for swimming. As a teenager, I bleached and foiled my hair, used filters to make my skin look lighter, and stayed out of the sun so my skin wouldn’t brown. By the end, my innards were as white as the next quintessential Australian girl, despite my brown skin and even darker roots. The obsession, though damaging, worked. I felt like one of them.

This experience in Australia is far from unique. It’s the same nerve that Australian director Amy Wang explores in her debut film, Slanted. For Wang, the film is deeply personal, born from her own upbringing in Sydney after moving from China at age seven. She recalls being eight years old in the Botanical Gardens, being told to "go back to China" by a stranger. Her response was the same as mine: to become the model minority. Speaking English without an accent, becoming friends with white Australians, refusing to speak Mandarin with her parents in public and purposely choosing to forget when certain Chinese holidays were. What she realised was that none of it mattered because there was always going to be one thing she couldn’t change — her face. 

The satirical body horror follows Joan Huang (Shirley Chen), a Chinese-American teenager who immigrated from Guangzhou and becomes consumed by a desperate obsession with being crowned her high school's prom queen. Feeling unwelcome in a world of white beauty standards, Joan is targeted by a mysterious company called Ethnos Inc., led by Dr Willie Singer, which offers a controversial Ethnic Modification surgery. Desperate to belong, Joan tricks her mother into signing a consent form and undergoes the procedure, waking up as a blonde, blue-eyed white girl named Jo Hunt (Mckenna Grace). But the film doesn’t let the fantasy settle. It tilts, quietly at first, into something darker, more unsettling, tracing the cost of that transformation. 

Wang wanted the movie to feel deeply uncomfortable while revealing the truth, and at times it was downright absurd, which only made me adore it more. Cinematically and tonally, Slanted shares DNA with the Demi Moore film The Substance, mirroring the protagonist's internal decay when she chooses the drug to make her younger. It’s the kind of darkly comic story that’s sharp, unsettlingly funny, intense, and pacey. I was hooked the entire time. The acting was also brilliant, the characters perfectly cast, and the dialogue impeccable. 

For me, it struck a visceral chord, and for anyone who has ever yearned to change their race, I think this movie would too. Had I been offered the chance at sixteen to erase who I was in order to be “perfect and white,” I’m not sure I wouldn’t have leapt at it. And yet, in the end, I know I would have deeply regretted erasing my heritage, something I’ve come to love about myself now, something I would never want to erase.