SXSW Grand Jury Winner Slanted Is The Substance for Prom Season

No event is more synonymous with the teenage American experience than prom. And the film industry, Satan bless it, has never lost sight of that fact. Prom movies are dime a dozen in the high school subgenre, ranging from the sweet (Never Been Kissed) to the spirited (Footloose) to the downright Shakespearean (10 Things I Hate About You).

Not only does prom have a way of heightening the already hormone-saturated high school experience, it has clear winners or losers like any other American institution worth its salt. Getting on that prom court is a must and becoming prom queen is the holy grail. It certainly is for Joan Huang (Shirley Chen), the second-generation Chinese American protagonist of satirical comedy-drama Slanted. In an effort to secure the hallowed crown, Joan undergoes an experimental “ethnic modification surgery,” coming out the other side as the whiter and more electorally viable Jo Hunt (Mckenna Grace), much to her parents’ horror.

Slanted was the Grand Jury Prize winner in the narrative feature competition at SXSW and one of the best films to come out of the festival this year. Just before the Amy Wang-directed movie conquered Austin, Den of Geek welcomed Wang, Chen, and the rest of the cast to our SXSW studio to discuss their multi-genre crowdpleaser. And, of course, we started with the obvious question.

“I went to three proms. I snuck into them,” star Mckenna Grace says.

“My prom was during COVID,” Amelie Zilber says, explaining her lack of experience in the area despite her character’s prom queen bona fides.

“I was actually prom queen!” Chen reveals. “Gotta flex on ’em. Theater prom, queen of the nerds.”

“I didn’t go to any proms because I grew up in Australia,” Wang says to a rapture of subsequent “awwwws” from her young cast. “It’s fine. I got all the prom I need here.”

Wang indeed has all the prom she needs in Slanted, but the idea for the film arose from tragic real world circumstances. A Chinese Australian filmmaker who grew up in the suburbs of Sydney, Wang was horrified by the uptick in violence against Asians in the United States amid the COVID-19 pandemic.

“There had just been a shooting in Atlanta with six Asian American spa workers murdered,” she remembers. “Later on that day I went out for a walk and it brought back a lot of emotions. Growing up in Sydney, experiencing a lot of racism in my teens, it just made me want to make a movie about this.”

The subsequent movie she made, while light and breezy as any high school comedy at times, also speaks to the frustrations and insecurities of young racial minorities in the Western world. It certainly spoke to the film’s star.

“I grew up in a small town in Washington state where they weren’t that many Asian Americans,” Chen says. “I vividly remember lying in bed at night and thinking, ‘Yeah when I’m 16 I’m going to be blonde and have blue eyes’ because I didn’t understand how any of that worked. I’ve grown into being somebody who loves being Chinese and being Asian American and all the community that comes with that. But there’s a kernel of that scared and vulnerable girl in me.”

Due to the Slanted‘s transformational premise, Chen occupies the lead role for only a little over half of the film’s running time before giving way to Grace as the “new” Jo. An ascendant young performer with major roles in The Haunting of Hill House, I, Tonya, and Ghostbusters: Afterlife, Grace worked closely with Chen to establish consistency in their character.

“It was definitely an interesting breakdown of a character to get. I was like ‘Who? You want me to do what?'” Grace says. “I could never understand what it’s like to be this character but I could deeply understand what it’s like to be a very insecure teenager. I really connected with that when reading it. [Chen and I] came up with a bunch of mannerisms to tie the two characters together. We wanted to make sure it translated.”

“Mckenna’s an ABG, can’t you tell?” Chen jokes of her counterpart, before clarifying for a baffled interviewer: “Asian Baby Girl!”

If the concept of two actresses playing the same role in a comedy with elements of body horror and social commentary sounds familiar, it’s probably because another movie in that remarkably targeted genre just found major success on the awards show circuit: The Substance.

“It was totally on purpose,” Wang jokes of timing the release of her film to the Demi Moore/Margaret Qualley project. “That’s been really great. From the get-go I wanted the movie to be satire and I wanted her face to fall apart. It’s definitely been a journey to combine these different genres from family drama to teen stuff with the comedy and the body-horror.”

Slanted has a lot of genres to straddle, from the gooey body horror of Chen and Grace’s imperfect procedure to the social satire of a modern day United States that seems permanently stuck in the immediate post-9/11 era. Through it all, however, lingers the most timeless of cinematic themes: teenagers and their problems. Maitreyi Ramakrishnan, who plays Jo’s friend Brindha, previously starred as Devi Vishwakumar in the Netflix high school series, Never Have I Ever. Despite the tonal shifts between the two projects, she sees the universality in teenage insecurity.

“They’re so different in tone and character,” Ramakrishnan says. “It’s actually been really refreshing to play someone who is so comfortable in her own skin, which is nice representation in and of itself for audiences—just seeing someone being happy to be who they are. The high school experience of friendships breaking down is heartbreaking. And I think that’s a universal experience.”

Let’s hope that’s the only part of Slanted that remains a universal experience.

Slanted premiered at the SXSW Film Festival on March 8.

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