Slanted

Grade: C+

Aside from Ozempic and the like, there seems to be a pill/shot/regimen to quickly and easily take care of whatever it is about you that you don’t like. It sounds too good to be true (and I can understand the temptation), as paragraphs of fine print flash at the bottom of the screen in the commercials. The Substance may have been a fictional product, but it was a clear commentary on the “here’s a pill to quickly improve yourself” trend. You get more than you bargained for. There’s no such thing as a free lunch.

Shell, out last year, was a cheap Substance knockoff. Slanted goes fishing in the pools of The Substance and Get Out. The plot involves Joan Huang, a Chinese-American high schooler. After using a social media filter that changes your ethnicity, she begins receiving DMs from the creators of the company – Ethnos, they’re called. After eventually reaching out, she visits the clinic, which specializes in race reconstructive surgery. Not just any race. Guess which one. It’s out-patient, having you on your way in a couple hours. There’s no satisfying explanation for how this is possible, but Joan undergoes it – emerging as a beautiful blonde who now goes by Jo Hunt.

I enjoyed getting to know Joan. Shirley Chen (Dìdi) brings charm and sincerity to the role, and it was bittersweet, as I knew she would leave the movie halfway through. We trade one appealing actress for another. Mckenna Grace is the perfect choice to play the post-surgery “Jo Hunt.” She’s one of my favorites in the business right now, and she fares surprisingly well, despite a plot that resembles Swiss cheese. It doesn’t take much to convince her parents that she’s still Joan. There’s a poignant bit of dialogue where her dad tells her she looked like her late grandmother, and it was his pride and joy that she carried her memory that way. Other than that, mom and dad go along with it.

The cut-and-paste is unrealistically seamless at school. Nobody seems to be that fazed by Joan’s disappearance – where at the same time, all of a sudden there’s this new girl. Joan’s reasoning for wanting to change is pretty flimsy. What is it, you may ask? Is it a “workplace equality” thing? Getting special treatment from – or at least being taken seriously by – the police? None of those. She wants to be nominated for prom queen. This could have been solved by someone just telling her to tough it out for the rest of high school, nobody will care about that stupid award next week, and there’s a whole life ahead of you after that.

A side effect rears its ugly head, no pun intended. Jo gets invited to dinner at the home of a family who is also an Ethnos client. There she sits, looking like Sean Penn at the end of One Battle After Another, while the hosts speechify about how great their life is now – and the more people who use the treatment, the closer we will get to true equality. You’d think a better conversation for the moment would be about how Jo can deal with her current cosmetic problem.

The last little scene throws the body horror fans a bone. It’s too little too late, and I wanted more – just one or two scenes – to flesh out the conclusion, no pun intended. Most of Slanted is very safe and tame, only to end abruptly after a tiny bit of gore. There’s some fun humor along the way. I liked it the best when it was an over-the-top satire. The original song that plays while the patients are “under” isn’t the most politically correct thing in the world, but it’s very funny, and probably more true than we admit. Ultimately, though, Slanted feels half-baked, derivative, and incomplete.

Grade: C+