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Warning: Full spoilers for the film follow.

I went into Slanted with rather limited expectations. The reviews have been middling, but I was willing to take a chance on it, both because I love body horror and because I love a film that grapples with complex social issues. To some extent, Slanted does do that–its story about a young Chinese-American woman who decides to undergo an experimental surgery that will transform her into a White person forever is one that has a great deal of contemporary relevance–but it ultimately isn’t willing to commit to its own bit. It stumbles in a host of ways, not least because it feels pulled in two different directions: on the one hand, its commentary is about as blunt as a sledgehammer, while on the other it never really goes whole-hog on its body horror conceit. The result is a film that’s both muddled and deeply frustrating.

Written and directed by Amy Wang, the film focuses on Joan Huang (Shirley Hunt), the daughter of Chinese immigrants Sofia and Roger Huang (Vivian Wu and Fang Du). Though she loves her father in particular, Joan carries around a deep shame and loathing of her Chinese identity, one that is exacerbated by her desperate desire to be prom queen. Her shame runs so deep, in fact, that when she’s offered the chance to undergo an experimental surgery to turn White, she jumps at the chance, transforming into Jo Hunt (Mckenna Grace). However, the transformation proves to be a double-edged sword, as it not only alienates her from her parents and her best friend but also has unforeseen physical side effects.

In order for a film like this one to really work–or, to put it slightly differently, for it to have real teeth as a piece of social and cultural commentary–it has to be willing to lean into whatever elements it’s playing with. This is particularly true when you decide to play in the genre of the body horror, which is known for its extremes and for its ability to make an audience squirm. For a while, I had hopes Slanted was going to go this route–there’s a quasi-gnarly moment during her hair transplant where we get a few close-ups of the machine pulling out her hair by the roots–but then the film just sort of limply indulges in some subpar body horror imagery, most of which involves Jo/Joan’s face starting to sag. It all leads to the fateful moment when she’s crowned prom queen, only for her once-beautiful visage to appear sagging and wrinkled, leading to her classmates’ revulsion.

In a braver film, this whole sequence could easily have been as horrifying and tragic as in Carrie, where the title character’s final humiliation leads to her self-immolation and that of most of her high school classmates. Slanted, however, chooses to play it safe. To be quite honest, I was very underwhelmed by the physicality of it all, which just felt sad rather than horrifying. I kept thinking…is this it? This is what all of this has been building to? It’s not that I wanted Joan to suffer, obviously, but when you’ve been told you’re watching a body horror film, you expect more…body horror? As it is, it was almost comedic, which just isn’t the vibe I think you were supposed to get from the film as a whole.

It’s especially frustrating that the most horror-inducing moment ends up being the very last frame, in which Jo, filled with remorse, has torn off parts of her White face, revealing glimmers of the girl she was before. One can easily imagine a film where this would’ve been the climax toward which it was all leading, and I’d go so far as to say this approach would have been genuinely horrifying. In my view, the best and most affecting horror films are those with an element of tragedy to them, and it’s hard to think of something more tragic than a young Asian American woman only recognizing the true consequences of what she’s done once it’s too late. As it is, it feels like more of an afterthought, and rather than engendering the emotions associated with horror it just left me frustrated for what the film might have been.

That said, I do think there’s something compelling, and more than a little terrifying about the film’s central premise, which suggests a distressing number of people of color would take the chance to be White if they could. One of the most genuinely disturbing films in the entire film is when we see an entire crowd of BIPOC folks clamoring to get in to see the doctor and get their own surgery. For his part, R. Keith Harris gives a chilling performance as Dr. Willie Singer, who was an Indian-American doctor who perfected the surgery, espousing the philosophy of “if you can’t beat them, be them.” However, as frightening as all this is, it just doesn’t quite gel with the rest of the film, in particular Joan’s desperate desire to be homecoming queen and the just general awfulness of her White peers, which sometimes become more caricatures than real people.

If there’s one thing that saves this film, it’s the performances of Vivian Wu and Fang Du as Joan’s parents. The scenes between Joan and her mother are particularly wrenching, especially since Sofia genuinely loves her daughter and wants to share important pieces of family lore and tradition with her. The fact that Joan can’t see this until too late is far more horrifying than anything that happens to her body after her transformation.

Is Slanted a bad movie? I wouldn’t go so far as to say that. However, it is undeniably a frustrating one, and I kept finding myself wishing it could’ve gone just a bit further, could’ve gone for the throat. Failing that, it could’ve been a bit subtler in its delivery, especially since its central message is an important one. The way that Whiteness–White identity, White skin, White culture–is constantly framed by our society as something toward which everyone should aspire is a problem, and it causes untold damage to BIPOC everywhere. However, while Slanted clearly aspires to Get Out levels of cultural commentary, it ultimately falls flat, leaving us wondering what might have been.

From “The 400 Blows” to “The Florida Project,” kids have made fascinating cinematic subjects. Even if they’re working from scripts, there’s always the sense that they’re not entirely acting — that they can’t help but simply be themselves. The French director Bruno Dumont, a former philosophy professor who broke into Cannes nearly 30 years ago with his stark feature debut “The Life of Jesus,” has gravitated towards the raw naturalism of youngsters in the past. See “Li’l Quinquin” from 2014, and his musical curios about France’s patron saint “Jeannette,” (2017) and “Joan of Arc” (2019), all three of which find a strange, startling profundity in ragtag rugrats, say, debating theology or blankly witnessing acts of violence. 

Childhood, for Dumont, isn’t a stage of pure innocence, but a transition period where adult behaviors are tried on by little ones who don’t entirely know what they mean, or what the stakes are. Such is the case with his latest feature, “Red Rocks,” which involves children roughly between the ages of five and seven jumping off cliffs, riding mini motorcycles and partaking in gang warfare — or its pre-verbal equivalent. Long, static, mostly wordless takes will make these activities seem less eventful than they sound. Patient arthouse viewers, however, will find much to chew on here as a subtly cerebral film about small bodies unsettlingly, hilariously navigating a big, violent world.

Blending documentary-style observation and a Romeo and Juliet framing device, “Red Rocks” — which premiered in the Cannes Directors’ Fortnight program — is scaled-back for Dumont compared to his 2021 Cannes competition entry “France,” a media satire starring Léa Seydoux, and last year’s “The Empire,” a critically divisive “Star Wars” spoof that premiered at the Berlinale.

Twitchy, blond tyke Géo (Kaylon Lancel) and his posse (Louise Podolski and Mohamed Coly) meet another trio of tinies while enjoying their favorite activity: scaling rock formations and taking (seemingly quite dangerous!) plunges into the ocean waters below. One member of the opposing crew, Eva (Kelsie Verdeilles), takes a liking to Géo, though their romance is hampered by Eva’s other boyfriend B (Alessandro Piquera). Not that romance, here, means anything beyond hand-holding and giggling while awkwardly staring into each other’s eyes. 

Cinematographer Carlos Alfonso Corral (co-producer of Roberto Minervini’s “The Damned”) alternates between fish-bowl closeups of the children’s faces and extreme wide shots of the craggy, coastal landscape. The effect is a bit like watching a tripped-out version of “Mister Rogers’ Neighborhood” or “Thomas & Friends,” the Mediterranean setting — complete with arched viaducts and train tracks —miniaturized into a kind of fantasy playground for its band of tots to roam around freely.

A fair share of camera tricks and strategic angles make the kids’ climbing stunts look significantly riskier, though in a masterclass following the premiere, Dumont admitted to a degree of recklessness, choosing to shoot many of the film’s scenes in Italy as opposed to France, because of filming laws in the latter country pertaining to minors. In this Gallic Neverland, there’s not a safety helmet (or nervous parent) in sight, which admittedly adds to the film’s feral energy. Their twiggy legs and bony frames exposed in bathing suits, the kids do indeed look extra vulnerable within the film’s savage landscape. That’s precisely Dumont’s intention — freedom is fun and scary — but the choice is sure to raise eyebrows among critics of the director, who has historically been called out for his work with nonprofessional actors. 

The star-crossed lovers drama is mostly a justification to watch the kids play and pull weird and mesmerizing expressions, which turns repetitive over the film’s slim 90-minute runtime. Still, there’s amusement and electricity in their physicalities and wry antics. Working, again, at the boundary between the sublime and the silly, Dumont nevertheless manages to stake out new territory with this alien portrait of childhood. This may be something of a transitional work for a director who tends to shape-shift, but you’ve got to hand it to a guy unafraid to experiment. 

The always eminently watchable Rebecca Hall (The Man I Love, TV’s The Beauty) both anchors and buoys the tonally irregular but consistently thoughtful and compelling sci-fi comedy-drama The End of It, a feature debut for Catalan writer-director Maria Martinez Bayona.

Offering a near future that’s creepily plausible, resonant with recent headlines and nicely underplayed in terms of design, this posits Hall as Claire, a 250-year-old artist who’s kept looking like an elegant 30something thanks to sophisticated blood dialysis techniques and other kinds of high-tech, vaguely defined wizardry, available to a very select few.

However, when Claire grows bored with an effectively immortal life and chooses to die, her husband Diego (Gael García Bernal), 180-year-old daughter Martha (Noomi Rapace), and android personal assistant Sarah (Beanie Feldstein) react in various ways, ranging from supportive to angry. Running an attenuated 142-minutes, this feels slightly flawed by a script that doesn’t quite know how to play out its endgame and erupts with jarring flashes of spongey, overegged satire. Still, the performances and visuals consistently add value, and if this doesn’t sell many tickets IRL, it should haul in clicks as a streaming entity.

Shot mostly in the Canary Islands with the region’s searing, glaring Tropic-of-Cancer-adjacent light, freakishly black, volcanic soil and groovy mid-century-modernist buildings, the film suggests a future where the worst climactic disasters have been avoided. That, or the people we meet here are wealthy enough to have found a cushy little enclave to live forever without a care in the world. It seems they’re part of the select few, members of a vaguely alluded-to world order that provides the means to exist in a state of permanent, hedonistic ennui.

But the only way to get in on this immortality gig, or to be granted permission to have a baby, is for someone else to die. And since no one expires from, say, cancer or other now-curable diseases, and bones and organs can be replaced like car parts with artificial spares, people only pass when involved in freak accidents…or take their own lives.

On the occasion of her 250th birthday (she gets a cake with so many candles she can barely be bothered to blow them out), Claire is in a funk and just not enjoying any of this anymore. Having just replaced her last remaining natural bone, she takes stock. Years ago, she was an acclaimed artist whose work was a bit avant-garde and challenging. Now she designs jewelry, a remunerative but not very intellectually rewarding pursuit. (This plot point is a bit mean to jewelry designers.) Suffering an acute case of anhedonia, she decides that she will no longer have her blood work every day or any other kind of life-extending treatment and instead will just let nature take its course.

As grey hairs appear and other augurs of age become visible, Claire contends with the varied reactions of her small social circle. She couldn’t care less about the assorted colorful acquaintances who attended her birthday party, a cohort clad in an assortment of semi-minimalist clothes with funky little details and interestingly textured textiles, as if dressed in a mix of Comme des Garçons and Cos. (Costume designer Pau Auli’s work throughout is both witty and oddly covetable with its precise tailoring and subtle color palette.)

But it is more upsetting that Diego, her husband of many years, doesn’t get her reasoning at all, or even sees this as a personal rejection. Sarah, Claire’s relentlessly perky robot sidekick, similarly cannot compute why Claire would wish to undermine Sarah’s prime directive, to keep Claire alive. But she’ll do whatever it takes to keep her mistress happy, like some kind of humanoid golden retriever.

Only her daughter Martha, who shows up suddenly, having not seen her mother in 50 years, seems at peace with Claire’s decision. That turns out to be because she thinks this may be her chance to take Claire’s place as a breeding female in their society and has brought along an android baby to practice on, like some kind of 23rd century Tamagotchi that can be switched off and recharged whenever necessary.

Prone to wearing clothes that suggest an overgrown pre-teen herself, all frills, flounces and bright colors, Martha doesn’t look like great maternal material to Claire, although this judgmental attitude may be evidence of her own maternal deficiencies. The peevish sparring between the two of them gets a comic push from the fact that the two actors are very close in age (Hall is three years younger than Rapace), but like so many parents and children they remain stuck in a dynamic that formed sometime in adolescence and has never been outgrown.

The digs at the pretensions of artists, channeled through Claire’s decision to make her death a public spectacle in order to secure some future fame, are less amusing here because the blows never seem to quite connect with their targets. Also, one begins to suspect that a small budget prohibited the filmmakers from showing a wider view of this society, which also dampens any parodic purpose. Claire’s elective death therefore remains a problematic choice for some viewers, an act of vainglorious selfishness from a woman who was never terribly nice to begin with.

It’s lucky she’s played by Hall, who endows Claire with a spiky sort of wit and charisma, while her performance in the film’s final minutes packs a considerable emotional wallop and pathos to spare. The impact of that shocking final scene is sufficient to send viewers out feeling enervated after what’s been a pretty desultory final act. But even with these flaws, The End of It looks like it marks the beginning of an interesting career for its young writer-director, a talent with a strong visual sensibility and skills with actors.