Fake performative workplace conversations — specifically “How was your weekend?” — get the horror movie treatment in Cam Banfield‘s debut short called exactly that. “How Was Your Weekend?,” which premiered at the SXSW Film & TV Festival and next heads to the San Francisco Film Festival next week, is an office space horror where there is no Innie or Outie. There is only yourself, and if you didn’t have a good weekend, then the rest of us can’t have a good week.
Nominated for the SXSW grand jury short film award, “How Was Your Weekend?” stars James Morosini (“It’s What’s Inside“) as Steven, a cubicle drone at an anonymous, windowless corporate hovel somewhere in a depressing pocket outside Los Angeles. He arrives at the office on a Monday morning after a bad weekend of relationship troubles at home, and his coworkers are all buzzing with the question, “How was your weekend?” And when he dares to say his wasn’t great, the office population descends into surreal madness.
“I can’t unsee the microaggressions in the horror of everyday life in almost everything I’m trying to do and trying to write about,” said Banfield in an IndieWire interview after SXSW over Zoom. (I was speaking from a tiny cubicle at work; he was at his apartment in Santa Monica, home from his office job lunch break to make the interview.) “What got me so excited about this project and making this short is the way there’s never been workplace horror before, defined this way, and the jump scares of office life and the discomfort of opening yourself up in this ritualistic office environment where we’re all told to clock in 9 to 5, and it pushes against your individuality.”
Hailing originally from Texas, Banfield has a handful of small acting credits to his name, but “How Was Your Weekend?” is his first film as a writer/director. “I was working at this job that I started to see things that I couldn’t unsee,” said Banfield of the experiences that led him to make the film. Since the SXSW premiere, he’s signed with the talent and production management company Anonymous Content and is at work on the feature script version of the short.
“What if a guy’s weekend was not good? ‘How about yours?’ ‘It was actually fucking terrible,’ and that opens up the hellscape underneath everybody’s office,” he said of his ultimate pitch for the film. “You open up the short with this guy in his car, but we’re like, oh wait, he’s more like a prisoner, not a commuter. This is a prisoner reporting for his daily sentence. You got to turn that work mode on, man. Shut off that personal life.”
He described the SXSW short as a “blatant proof of concept” — as many shorts are en route to becoming features — which means “How Was Your Weekend?” won’t as of yet be available to stream, and instead will tour film festivals.
“Everybody’s experiencing these things in the modern society we’re all in, the lack of individuality, the hive mind, people on their lunch breaks brain-rotting on their phones, all looking at the same collective thing,” Banfield said. “It has to be explored as a movie. I’m deep in it on the script right now to make it into a feature. It’s going to be a true, contained modern horror thriller set around the central question of the short film.” (Composer Zack Robinson and cinematographer Matt Clegg ramp up the tension with recognizably horror-genre elements that turn the mundane into the macabre.)
Banfield sees the connections to the popular workplace TV satire “Severance,” though he promises his feature “How Was Your Weekend?” will tackle office culture from a unique angle that leans more into traditional horror. “Unfortunately, in our story, you can’t have your memories severed, and there is no Innie and Outie,” he said. “You have to deal with both sides. That is truly where everything lives: the personal, bleeding into the work. Unlike ‘Severance,’ It’s inevitable. Especially when someone opens up and is honest.”
The life-imitating-art nature of the production also remains a haunting one for Banfield, who filmed the short in summer 2024 over two days in a “sad office” outside LAX with non-professional actors.
“We started to hear stories in this weekend cohort … [one] had just taken a leave of absence for depression from their own job, and they were just trying this out. Another woman had been a vet for 30 years, and she literally wanted to just try something for herself for once and got cast in this and suddenly loves acting,” Banfield said, adding, “It’s a sad office, man, and it was almost haunting going in there and seeing the things that the former tenants [left]… There were family wallet-sized photos just left in the filing cabinets. It was surreal.”
“How Was Your Weekend?” plays SFFILM on Thursday, April 24.
