‘Wouldn’t life be easier if I were white?’: inside a provocative race-swap body horror

In March 2021 six Asian women were killed in a mass shooting in Atlanta, and Amy Wang — an Asian Australian writer-director who emigrated to the US in 2015 — recalls that moment as when she first felt genuinely unsafe. Childhood memories of internal and external racism returned, including a recurring teenage thought: ‘Wouldn’t life be easier if I were white?’ She turned that feeling into Slanted, her audacious feature debut, which won the 2025 narrative feature grand jury prize at SXSW.

Slanted posits a cosmetics clinic called Ethnos (tagline: if you can’t beat them … be them) that performs a procedure rendering people of colour visibly white. The film follows Joan, played by Didi’s Shirley Chen, who after surgery becomes Jo, played by Scream 7’s McKenna Grace, and finds life suddenly easier — but fraught with unforeseen costs.

Wang mixes dark satire, body horror and coming-of-age drama to push the premise to its uncomfortable limits.

United States, Atlanta

slanted, amy wang, race swap, body horror, ethnos, joan, mckenna grace, shirley chen, sxsw, atlanta shooting