Sean Parker
How Was Your Weekend? These four banal little words we ask our coworkers to preserve office etiquette that often has a joyless auto-response attached. I suppose it depends on your corporate culture, but most offices simply don’t care what you’re going through these days. They just need you to be productive. So, what if the answer to that trivial question is more than the asker bargained for with their small talk? How do you console an unraveling coworker you may barely even know? Writer-director Cam Banfield explores these questions and provides a scathing response in the darkly satirical short film How Was Your Weekend?, which follows Steven (James Morosini) through an excruciating case of the Mondays.
Generally speaking, I believe more horror needs to invade office spaces. Movies like Mayhem, The Belko Experiment, and Bloodsucking Bastards therapeutically alleviate corporate pressure, effectively unburdening the minutiae of micromanagement and other standard operating procedures that frustrate workers on a daily basis. Essentially, seeing writers tear down the things that get us aggravated at work is not only cathartic, it makes us feel like we’re not alone.
Banfield has created something very special with How Was Your Weekend? At only nine minutes, the filmmaker takes viewers through a carefully crafted ecosystem where individuality is frowned upon. It’s a Kafkaesque nightmare of dread, conformity, and pizza parties, where management relies on individuals to adhere to the bare minimum human decency protocols for compassion and empathy in the name of better productivity. A soul-sucking “office family” that hinges on the Severance qualities of separating your home life from your work life.
As I started How Was Your Weekend?, the familiar sentiment of Steven trying to collect himself in his car felt all too real. Most of us do this from time to time, curling up under the covers, defiant of the alarm clock buzzer’s alerts that our weekend is over. However, in Steven’s case, his reluctance to walk into the building comes from a place where hearing the phrase “How Was Your Weekend?” becomes daunting. When he tries to express how bad his weekend was, the office becomes an authoritarian institution where his individual issues aren’t just unallowed, they’re strictly forbidden.
Banfield seems inspired by many works here, from the office culture in Brazil, the use of special anamorphic lenses as in Everything Everywhere All at Once, and the pod-people behavior of The Invasion of the Body Snatchers (1978). While all these films are quite different, Banfield fuses them together well. Using each piece to drive home the underlying point of How Was Your Weekend?, which is that your company only cares about itself despite framing you as part of the family.
How Was Your Weekend? also features a fantastic cast of recognizable faces. Morosini, last seen in Netflix’s body-swapping horror flick It’s What’s Inside, gives Steven his grounded nature. Meanwhile, Suits’ Rachel Harris plays his almost apparition-like boss, who lays out the corporate expectation for continued employment. From behind the camera, there’s a lot to like about this workplace fever dream, too. The editing and the lens effects certainly make the film stand out as How Was Your Weekend? employs the fantastic talents of Director of Photography Matt Clegg, whose Tribeca feature Bad Shabbos won the Audience Award at Tribeca in 2024, and Greener Grass’ Taylor Gianotas as editor.
Audiences at SXSW received a surreal treat with How Was Your Weekend? this weekend during the Narrative Shorts 1 block. Attendees will have one additional opportunity to catch Cam Banfield’s short film when the block replays on March 11.
