Slanted
Joan, a young girl of Chinese-American origins, aspires to become the undisputed queen of the school dance, ardently desiring the recognition and attention of her peers. To achieve this goal, she agrees to undergo an innovative treatment that radically alters her appearance, lightening her skin and distancing her from her cultural roots. What initially appears as the fulfillment of a dream of acceptance and popularity soon turns into a dramatic experience, where the implications of identity, race, and belonging reveal themselves to be more complex and painful than expected.
The film thus takes shape as a bitter and satirical reflection on the challenges of reconciling oneself with one’s origins in a world that exalts nearly universally homogenized aesthetic models.
The beauty myth is a powerful tool of social control, imprisoning women in unattainable standards.
— Naomi Wolf
— Naomi Wolf
An unsettling and radical investigation into youth’s obsessive desire to embody a monochromatic, standardized ideal of beauty that transcends geographical and cultural boundaries to become a global paradigm. The film moves like a distorted echo of The Substance in a youthful form, disarmingly reflecting on the painful dissolution of identity roots in the name of illusory aesthetic perfection.
At first a child, then a teenager divided between two worlds: the Chinese culture of her parents, who, even at thirty, had a full and rooted understanding of what it meant to be part of that tradition, and her attempt to become and define herself as “American at all costs.” This dichotomy highlights the deep fracture between cultural heritage and the craze to conform to an imposed aesthetic model, suggesting that belonging and difference are sacrificable on the altar of homogenization.
The motto of Ethnos, the medical center where the transformative procedures take place — “If you can’t beat them, be like them” — evokes a reality as bleak as it is inevitable: to sprout, the seed must perish. It is a bitter metaphor for the loss of self that the film denounces, a process of erasing and rewriting identity that leads to the death of diversity and the birth of a depersonalizing uniformity.
In this context, Slanted reveals the terrifying beauty of white skin as a contemporary myth to chase, a universal desire with the taste of tragedy: “How beautiful is it to be white?” becomes the obsessive question, the aesthetic obsession overwhelming the characters, forcing them to deny their origins until they become an empty shell, “non cringe,” that is, socially acceptable and integrated. But who defines these canons? And what price is paid in embracing such totalitarian normalization?
Another motto of those who have undergone the treatment is: “We believe in true equality” … therefore, we eliminate differences.
The film turns toward horror in its final part, strongly recalling The Substance, not so much as a mere stylistic reference but for the shared examination of conformity as an extreme form of control and annihilation of individuality. The radical transformation of a Cuban father and daughter, exiled and separated from the mother due to her refusal to undergo the treatment, becomes a painful emblem of the family and cultural disintegration caused by this disturbing homogenization machine.
Slanted is not only a film about aesthetic pursuit; it is an existential drama exploring the abyss between the liberating promise of “become what you are” and the cruel reality of “become what they want you to be.” Here, authenticity seems a chimera, self-knowledge a mirage under the weight of global conformity, while the culture of origin crumbles, buried under an illusory patina of beauty.
Amy Wang delivers to us a lucid and painful warning: in the age of homogenized substance, the struggle to maintain one’s authentic identity is a fragile, often invisible, but radically necessary resistance.
When we reject the notion that beauty is narrowly defined, we reclaim power over our bodies and our lives.
— Bell Hooks
— Bell Hooks
This movie was in the official competition of Torino Film Fest 2025