Just Be Awesome
2024 · 14m · UK
Directed by Ed Kear, Cringo Williamson
Tones: absurdist, darkly comic, humorous
Alex, a struggling freelancer pushing 40, desperately needs a real job to support his fed-up wife — but his interview attempts spiral into excruciating, self-sabotaging chaos as he tries (and fails) to project the breezy confidence the modern workplace demands.
Picked by Felix
The scouts
Finally, someone weaponizing millennial corporate theology against itself—a Gen-X guy performing 'authenticity' for kids who invented it, and the film knows exactly how absurd that inversion is. Everyone else would've softened the edges; Kear and Williamson let it curdle.
The deadpan restraint recalls a lineage of British social discomfort comedy, though the film's satirical target—workplace performance culture—risks feeling slightly too immediate, too zeitgeist-dependent to age as the formal precision here might deserve.
The genius move is the casting against type: watching a visibly exhausted man *try* to nail the upbeat corpo-speak while his face betrays everything creates the whole film's tension without a wasted frame, and that tension is doing all the heavy lifting.
Reviews
AWARD WINNING comedy short — Best Comedy at the BAFTA-qualifying Bolton Film Festival 2024.
Festivals
- Bolton International Film Festival 2024, Best Comedy
- Venezia Shorts 2024
- Winchester Film Festival 2024
- McMinnville Short Film Festival 2025