Movie Review: The Coffee Table is disturbing, sinister and exquisitely uncomfortable
Independent films usually have limited releases in movie theaters, their filmmakers present them at festivals to publicize their work, which are subject to the scrutiny of very demanding critics who look for that detail that makes them stand out among the others and earn them awards. a prize.
Many of these productions made in many countries are destined to end up in home formats or as filler for some platform, but what about those that win awards and that are liked by locals and strangers or by more general public, this may transcend and his creative team has more work in other types of work or that nothing happens and it is just the novelty of the moment while the big studios spend millions of dollars on guaranteed failures.
To be honest, this can be seen as something very unfair because we have an idea and carry it out with good results, but nothing happens, especially for all those who were involved in that entire process, we tend to criticize in a bad way without knowing what is there. Behind the final result, it seems that from the outset this is doomed to failure and that only a few know about it and recommend it by word of mouth.
Spain is a country that has had very good film productions, great directors and actors have taken us to know stories in different genres, some very successful and others not so lucky that are forgotten, there is a director who has done what he has able with what he has had, the short films Nada S.A (2014). A Love Story (2015), I’m Sorry Honey (2015), It’s Not What It Seems (2015), R.I.P (2017), ASYLUM: Twisted Horror and Fantasy Tales (2020) gave him the gateway to the world of cinema With Matar a Dios (2017) and The Coffee Table (2022), Caye Casas together with Albert Pintó have made interesting proposals in their stories, in their direction and their cinematography.
In a very punishing 2022 for the film industry came The Coffee Table, a project that is difficult to describe and has had its highest point in 2024, causing controversy and dividing opinions. The film has already been shown in different festivals with success putting its filmmakers on the right path to continue delivering such good works with a peculiar and sinister way of telling stories.
What is the movie about?
María (Estefanía de los Santos) and Jesús (David Pareja) have just become parents, but their relationship is not going through the best moment, this crisis has caused them to have more problems, what they cannot imagine even in their worst nightmares is what Buying a dining room table will become the worst decision of your lives.
Some works are characterized by being very peculiar, their vision may or may not be novel, they may or may not give us a good experience in a time of entertainment, and they may or may not involve us in their plot beyond what we think. and in the end, it may or may not leave us thinking about what we just saw and what relationship that has to something that has personally happened to us.
Having said the above, the Caye Casas The Coffee Table does this and more and here the question should be asked, how do you tell something without telling anything? We are in the era of the potential spoiler, some are in favor, others against, and others the only thing that matters is causing debate with the above, A few films cause an uncomfortable or unpleasant effect on the viewer, and some know a lot and also those who do not know anything about what they are going to see, I remember that this media phenomenon occurred with 3 films, The Blair Witch Project (1999), Paranormal Activity (2007) and A Quiet Place (2018) where the attendees of a movie theater got involved with what they were seeing, making this experience something strategically planned and novel.
We well know that an entire plot can develop from one idea that involves more subplots within a main one. Some are too elaborate and end up confusing us due to their lack of fluidity and because they want to tell everything in a very short time. Others are simple and easy to understand. See, how a fast and bold narrative that immediately puts us in context without us having to have any prior baggage, takes a moment and for a certain time shows us a series of events that end with a climate whether shocking or not. , the game of fortune telling and knowing in advance what is going to happen and how it is going to conclude has been very fashionable in recent years due to the lack of creativity of its filmmakers or the demands of the studios for wanting to earn more at the box office than by presenting something of quality.
The Coffee Table redefines itself as a dramatic thriller with overtones of horror and no, it is not about a table possessed by some demon or that it represents something paranormal, it is simply how they define it at the beginning:
“The “famous” Rörret coffee table with an unbreakable bronze tinted glass, a structure with an image of 2 beautiful ladies modeled in ivory and bathed in a perfect imitation of gold, a piece of Swedish design, so versatile that it can be used in the living room, in the bedroom or in any corner of the home where you want to give an elegant and designer look, with a terrible design and taste, it should be clarified, and it is intended to be the preferred table for having a coffee or an aperitif with our loved ones. , and he assures us that this table, due to its (awful) design and its level, will change our lives for the better and will bring us happiness at home.”
The above could not be further from the truth, a charlatan salesman who would do and say anything to sell his shit to an unsuspecting person who wants to buy it, and from this moment on things are going to change radically and not change their lives for the better and bring happiness to the home, but on the contrary, this is going to turn their worst nightmare into something real and it must be clarified that as María, her protagonist, says, “nothing is unbreakable.” That being said, this horrible table will be the one that sets It tests the characters and impacts us as an audience.
Many of us ask ourselves, how could a damn coffee table change my life for the worse? It is not the table in itself, it is everything that surrounds it, the tension of its characters that becomes increasingly deeper to the point where by an accident we verify that this unbreakable glass tinted in bronze causes a tragedy to a married couple in the that things are not going well at all, a husband who feels pressured by his partner who has already chosen everything, from the wedding day, what he and his mother will wear and even the decision to have a child and name him. Cayetano, which is the name of her grandfather, which he refers to as a tacky name, like a fascist bullfighter, and it is here that the first spark of black humor jumps when the seller mentions that he is also called Cayetano like his father, his grandfather, his great-great-grandfather and several more generations and the wife refers to this gentleman salesman as horrible and shabby like the little table, this already puts us in the context of what we are going to see later.
According to the reasoning and I agree that objects are very shabby, you have to treat them well and give them love, without a doubt one of the worst sales strategies, I have to say that while I saw that and listened to this monologue from the seller, I would have left before he ended up not buying the damn table and that the protagonist ends up buying out of pride, from this we move on to the opening credits that we see interspersed in the manual on how to assemble the table, following this we see the façade of the building, the protagonist raising the box and the presentation of the other characters, the neighbor (Cristina Dilla) who is the mother of a very unlovable 13-year-old girl named Ruth (Gala Flores) who continually threatens Jesús with incriminating him for pedophilia while he rejects her advances for confusing an act of kindness with a fictitious crush.
The plot continues and Jesús and María continue arguing over the name of the child and other trifles that is when he notices that a screw is missing to be able to finish assembling the table and calls Cayetano to ask him to replace the missing one while talking to him he places the glass face up a detail that will take on vital importance, then María goes out to do some shopping to receive a visit from Carlos (Josep Maria Riera), Jesús’s brother, and his wife Christina (Claudia Riera), leaving Jesús alone with the baby, the Father tries, by all means, to stop him from crying, up to this point everything seems to be going normally until in a shot that we do not see and with the camera fixed we hear a stumble, a blow, a glass breaking despite the seller’s promise to decapitate the baby.
The above is an act that we never see explicitly, we only see flying glass and something that falls under the chair that we assume and later they confirm that it is the head of little Cayetano in a masterful and cinematically well-realized shot and only 19 minutes have passed. minutes of the 91 minutes that the film lasts, from this moment on things will begin to take a sinister and terrifying turn for the protagonists and for us as viewers, since we know that it was an accident we ask ourselves the question: how can we explain what would have happened if we were in Jesus’ place? the tension level goes from zero to one hundred in a matter of seconds, then the scene follows where we see what happened, the table, the broken glass, blood on the carpet, and the small headless body while a children’s song plays.
The shots, the shots, and the cinematography from this fact do not show the cruelest moments, nothing is revealed in everything that refers to this, it is off-camera and it is up to the viewer to structure everything else in his mind. , this is undoubtedly planned and done premeditated because what the director seeks is for us as an audience to get 100 percent involved with the plot and the characters, everything here turns out to be unfair, cruel, and hard enough to face, in At this point it is no longer necessary nor is it necessary to graphically show what has happened and what is going to happen and as an audience we are a little more immersive, more empathetic, more pimped with what we are seeing, thinking and feeling, a discomfort that each of us will know how to drive.
Talking more about what happens would be difficult to explain, it is each one who in the end will realize if what happened could happen to any of us or not if it has an extremist ending where all the subplots that have been handled In the script written by Cristina Borobia and Caye Casas himself, they succumb to an equally disturbing and uncomfortable fact, the handling of the information they have while there are visitors at home and María finds out what happened due to the insistence of Ruth’s inflammable falsely accuse Jesus and his wife of having kissed her in the elevator of the building, and that everyone presents faces something unexpected and this ends abruptly with the brother in shock and inside a patrol car babbling things that make no sense to the others but that we We understand perfectly without him stopping to repeat, “the little dining room table” while in parallel we are told what happened to Mary and Jesus that a tragedy gives rise to a greater one.
An unexpected closure in which we can already have the complete panorama and understand the reason for some shots that take on a singular and vital importance for everything else, at first we saw the building and the balconies, then how Jesus places the glass while he is assembling the table, we see that everything is going towards the same point where there will be a crossroads of all those small but very important stories as well as the development that each of the characters is having, we can appreciate the changes in mood, the fear, anguish, horror and we can assume that none of us, not even us, are prepared or can even think of something coherent that could happen so that all this can be understood and a solution can be found.
We are faced with a Spanish dramatic thriller that offers us a simple but impactful proposal, a plot that develops with solvency in itself and drags us along with it to a very miserable point, risking everything for everything in favor of the script in which the Circumstances turn harmless dialogues into something deeper and more horrible that goes from the disagreement of buying the damn table to a simple interaction between María and a man in the supermarket who asks her about wine, every word that is exchanged is strategically planned to be ironic, sarcastic, in bad taste but never something comforting.
It is here where we have revealed what the secret of success is in this film that confuses us due to its title and its advertising and this is that in itself it manipulates feelings and ideas by making its characters express their deepest emotions in a way that is too every day, we see horror coming because it is directly linked to the unknown that here is neither ethereal nor otherworldly nor are there serial killers or demons, or paranormal things, it is simply that an accident has occurred with devastating consequences that give way to something even more big and even more devastating.
The fear that Casas handles seems so recognizable to us, so innately human that allowing us as the audience to be the ones to know this terrible secret before any of the other characters is an experience that has very rarely been carried so well and to this level in cinema. If we talk about large productions, it is seen and many times proven that less is more, that it is those simple things that show that creativity can have no limits and present things like this without having to resort to easy scares or structured special effects with CGI or to confuse us as an audience that we have to overthink things, no no, here everything is suggested and direct.
It must be recognized that Caye Casas’s cinema does not mess around or waste time with long and meaningless scenes, nor does it come to educate us with moral messages that love conquers everything, it is just that his cinema is like that, direct, crude, cruel, who can laugh at himself out loud and then take you to the limit with a fear of the horror that you must face, his personal and very successful touch is to make us feel uncomfortable, give us a bad time but at the same time have a good time With this and here we ask ourselves, why feel this way if the purpose of cinema is to entertain and make us have pleasant times? The answer to this could be so simple to say, let whoever wants to see it and that’s it, but that’s not the case, there is also the fact of seeing something that breaks with everything traditional to which we are already accustomed, that breaks those paradigms that they impose and with which we “must” entertain ourselves and accept that cinema has changed and evolved by rethinking its own rules and woe to those who want to break them because it will surely be a failure.
Having said the above, perhaps there is a specific audience for this type of production that better understands what the filmmakers want to tell us and not a more general audience that only seeks to have a good time, that is not going to happen here, this is a work in The one where we want time to go faster and tell us what is happening, what they are doing, what they will do, how it will all end and this need for this to happen like this and so quickly is because it makes us feel uncomfortable. because we begin to overthink things that have nothing to do with the plot of the film but with our plot and history and it plays with us to do that sinister exercise of searching in the recesses of our mind for that dark secret, that thing that we made of which no one found out or whether it was on the contrary reliving the consequences of that or leaving undefeated to this day, maintaining it that way and pretending to everyone that although we are not perfect we have an image to take care of that we invented from that.
It is so uncomfortable that Casas puts us in the situation of the father or mother and asks us what we would have done in their place, perhaps this is a shameless mockery of all those films that do the same thing without even having a vestige of what is here. It turns out, and best of all, it leaves us with the implicit morbidity of wanting to see on another, more direct level what happened, to see how he stumbled and how the baby ended up decapitated, to see the body and head separated, to see what It happens at the end and I don’t doubt that they are already setting their eyes on this either to take the idea and make it a more concrete remake or to copy and imitate this style but at once we can guess that no one could do it better than what they have done. made its director, it would not have the same effect because we already know what is happening, we already imagine it in the most atrocious ways, and seeing it explicitly would only satisfy that morbid curiosity that we have as spectators and that current cinema has left us.
The same film suggests to us that even for a moment we are going to have a bad time. We perfectly accept and are aware of the disturbing situation in which we are placed as a spectator and this happens when we begin to empathize with its protagonist, whether we like it or not, we understand what has happened. past and make us complicit in an imaginary crime but one that carries a lot of truth in the things that happen in the real world.
We cannot say that after having seen all this Casas is not a genius or a director who promises a lot and has everything to succeed as long as he remains faithful to his style, we cannot say that this type of work is the most common and that Anyone can do it, nor can we deny the genius with which it is narrated and the effect that this has on us and this is what modern and current cinema was missing, a watershed between what can and is allowed to be done with a very limited budget. and whatnot, but above all, select your audience very well and who you can reach.
The cast is made up of David Pareja, Estefanía de los Santos, Josep Maria Riera, Claudia Riera, Eduardo Antuña, Gala Flores, Cristina Dilla, and Itziar Castro who do a spectacular job, understand their characters perfectly well and develop them to the level of what they the plot requires.
The music composed by Esther Méndez (Bambikina) has simple chords that range from childish and simple to pieces that increase tension and suspense, chords that achieve symmetry between what we see and hear, a very good work that is at the level of what is required.
In conclusion, The Coffee Table is a film that has rarely been seen, which makes us think that independent cinema has much more to offer and that this is where the future of cinema in this and other genres may lie. a work that marks a before and after, demonstrating that something bigger can come from a small and simple idea. Congratulations to its director and its entire creative team for giving us a clear and direct example that less is more.
The Coffee Table is now available on the Prime Video platform.
