It’s The Substance meets Mean Girls and it’s a frustrating execution of a provocative concept. Writer/director Amy Wang follows Chinese-American teenager Joan Huang (Shirley Chen) as she struggles to be accepted in her predominantly white, middle class, suburban school system. She sets her sights on being accepted by the popular girls, so she abandons her Chinese heritage, food, and looks to better adopt the habits of the very blonde popular clique, but bleaching her hair isn’t good enough to get what she wants. She discovers a mysterious company promising a scientific solution: they will genetically alter you to the race that you desire. What a fantastic plot device to explore racial identity, assimilation, prejudice, stereotypes, and more. It’s a crying shame then for this premise to be completely shackled to a high school cliques storyline. It’s so boring for our protagonist to be completely consumed with being prom queen when she’s just undergone an amazing and ethically questionable procedure. I kept waiting and wanting Slanted to do something more, to better explore the social commentary at stake but it’s really no different than your familiar story of non-popular girl sacrifices her personality and old friends to be popular only for them to remark, “You’ve changed!” This is such a crushing waste of such a promising premise. There’s not even memorable body horror; at one point we do get droopy face. Slanted is less a horror movie and more a middling drama too timid to better explore the rich implications of its concept. This is the kind of idea calling for surreal and excoriating satire, something along the likes of Boots Riley (Sorry to Bother You). To narrowly frame this story as an outsider wanting to be popular in high school is just terribly limited and disappointing and ultimately dull.

Nate’s Grade: C