Flavor of the Month
2026 · 14m
Directed by Nathan Xia
Genres: dark comedy, drama
Tones: contemplative, darkly comic
A B-list Chinese American actor spirals when he must screen-test against a newcomer he fears will replace him as "Hollywood's Asian."
Picked by Zoe
The scouts
It's a film about an actor afraid of obsolescence that doesn't wink at the absurdity—it just lets the guy *be* small and petty and scared, which is way more interesting than the satire everyone expects. Xia refuses to make this a comfortable parable about representation.
The dual portrait of anxiety and mentorship situates itself in a lineage of actor's-dilemma films, but the specificity of Chinese American precarity gives it formal weight beyond the genre's usual narcissistic confessions.
The entire film hinges on a single casting choice: putting the newcomer slightly off-center in the frame during the screen test, so we're never quite watching them straight-on—it's a technical commitment to the protagonist's paranoia that transforms what could've been a scene into something genuinely destabilizing.
Reviews
It finds a confident equilibrium between drama and comedy, maintaining a lightness of touch that makes the film wildly entertaining and satisfyingly funny. Yet that humour never comes at the expense of the film's ideas, creating space to explore themes of performative activism, virtue signaling, and internalized racial inferiority with surprising nuance.