When young Joan (Shirley Chen) sits at the lunch table early on in “Slanted,” sheepishly pulling out her tin-box lunch, it’s hard not to reflexively shield your eyes. Not out of anguish for the character, and the shame she feels when her classmates scrunch up their faces at her home-cooked Chinese meal, but for the movie itself.
Alas, it’s the stinky lunchbox moment, that dreaded trope of immigrant disorientation that has been recycled long enough that a chatbot was writing personal essays themed around it three years ago. The scene is a microcosm of this dismayingly regressive film, written and directed by Amy Wang, which shoves every facile idea of diaspora discourse into a blender, then chucks the machine at your head.
Joan is new to the United States, a strange land where she is inundated with images reinforcing white beauty standards, so much so that, as a teenager, she resorts to an operation that turns her into a full-fledged blond white girl (i.e. Mckenna Grace). Her new look might help her win prom queen, if only the creeping post-op body horror doesn’t take over before then.
It is no fun for a viewer to scoff at a film that purports to speak to pain that is real for many. But “Slanted” doesn’t actually have any interest in contending with those experiences seriously, instead using its palely observed traumas as a launchpad for a pastiche of other punchier genre films, from “Get Out” to “Mean Girls” to “The Substance.” Even there, the surgery is botched.
Slanted Rated R for language, some sexual material, teen drug use and brief violent content/bloody images. Running time: 1 hour 42 minutes. In theaters.
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