Some say that if a couple wants to test their relationship, go to IKEA. “The Coffee Table” (2022) proves that any furniture store will do. Set in contemporary Spain, new parents, Maria (Estefania de los santos) and Jesus Casas Borobia (David Pareja), with their newborn son, Cayetano, in tow, are trying to choose a coffee table. Jesus feels as if Maria makes all the decisions, and he should get one. Director and cowriter Caye Casas and cowriter Cristina Borobia ‘s film proves that Jesus should have just let Maria continue to take the lead.
For some reason, everyone loves Jesus. The salesman (Eduardo Antuna) is honest with him and wants to strike up a friendship The neighbors, mother (Cristina Dilla) and daughter, Ruth (Gala Flores), favor him over Maria. When Maria bumps into a friend (Itziar Castro) at the supermarket, Maria phones Jesus so she can say hi. Jesus’ brother, Carlos (Josep Maria Riera), who looks older, still yearns for the approval of his brother and as a child, suspects that Jesus prefers objects to people. The only one who treats Jesus like an average person is the love of his life, Maria.
While Maria is an unflinching ball buster, her assessments are not wrong. Jesus acts as if Maria has brought him kicking and screaming into a life of potential happiness, and he shows his resentment over the timing of having a baby, the name choice, and every other decision by choosing a table that is more trouble than it is worth from the beginning. Casas keeps his camera still as Jesus single-handedly drags the box up the stairs. Maria may seem hard, but that happens when you are doing all the heavy lifting: entertaining visitors, caring for the baby, remembering his brother’s dietary needs, putting on a happy face for the outside world. She is engaged in all the invisible and emotional labor—the kin keeper, chef, etc. Still, she loves Jesus, and though it is against her every instinct and nature, she obeys every request that he makes in “The Coffee Table,” including trying to make up to him for their earlier argument. They are not evil people, but right now, it is hard to see how they got together except in quieter moments when they are not fighting, and Jesus is at his most gentle after he commits an irreversible act.
Anyone familiar with “The Final Destination” franchise will predict early on what will happen with the titular object. Its base resembles a perv’s idea of an art deco table, but the crafter only had gold spray paint to cover the cheap material. Two naked women with arched backs, upturned faces and closed eyes face opposite directions. They make the base, and their uplifted hands are supposed to hold up a cheap rectangle of the most basic, translucent glass. It is more suitable as a curio from the eighties, and if it really was made from a precious metal, it would fit into Presidon’t’s Manhattan tower apartment. The excruciating, unpredictable part is what follows as Jesus tries to figure out what he should do after disaster strikes. Everyone should know that a coverup is always more disastrous than dealing with a problem head on so of course, Jesus mucks it up. Though frustrating, the viewer will be in his shoes because it is so hard to focus on what is happening around him as the elephant in the room is never handled until closer to the denouement. As “The Coffee Table” unfolds, Jesus’ better traits come out through the dialogue, specifically from Maria extolling his virtues. They got their apartment when his grandmother died, and it sounds as if he leapt at the chance to move his family in. He prepared the baby’s room first.
As Jesus unravels, there is a moment where it seems as if Jesus considers killing Maria as she laughs at him over their earlier disagreement. Is Jesus losing his mind, did his subconscious take over to create this disaster or is it just rotten luck? Because of his inability to handle anything, he becomes the nightmare partner and father who can’t do anything right. He destroys his life and can only appreciate it after it is gone. Because of his consummate incompetence and inability to be accountable, he destroys everyone around him. “The Coffee Table” may have answered the question, “What is worse than being a pedophile?” An ordinary, incompetent person who insists on taking the lead.
“The Coffee Table” is also a film about people being too frozen to save someone else. As horrible as Maria behaves, she is the only one who is focused outside of herself maybe because she is a new mother. She notices how the neighboring mother makes subtle digs about her age and is confident enough to let it go. Despite her earlier verbalized reservations about the relationship, she tries to make Cris (Claudia Riera), Carlos’ partner and a vegetarian, feel comfortable when Jesus says something horrible to her. Everyone else is theoretically making efforts to reach out, but it is out of self-interest so they can have another person meet their needs. In the final scene, no one reciprocates Maria’s care and stops her from witnessing the horrific result of Jesus’ choices and actions. Including Jesus, they are all too busy reacting to care for her. It did strain disbelief early in the film when people see Jesus covered in blood but mistake it for paint. Blood has a smell. It is only self-absorption that can explain that cluelessness.
The filmmakers have conceived a bleak, emotionally violent film, but other than a lot of blood, it is not actually graphic. It will feel graphic, and you may wind up with a headache afterwards. Cayas is wise to let us use our imagination. The visual vocabulary is perfect. Every shot conveys what the characters are thinking. As Jesus assembles the table, the camera, in a medium shot, focuses on the instructions laying on the carpet as Jesus’s hand appears in the frame, turns the page and nothing is there: not more instructions or the missing screw. Cayas keeps the camera away and gradually moves it forward just as the turning point happens. Cayas does not just stick to one gimmick but knows how to juggle a variety of techniques to suit the mood.
“The Coffee Table” is a Spanish movie, and some of the plot points get lost in translation from the baby’s name (is it awful) to an email address that references an unfamiliar prayer or the sound of a woman praying after the parents leave the nursery. The Carlist Wars are reduced to a breakfast legend. It won’t ruin your experience if you are not from that region and do not understand all the allusions. The narrative evokes universal themes and turns on normal life that could easily happen to anyone. No gods or monsters here, or if there is a God, all those prayers seem like mockery as they go unanswered. It is easy to imagine news broadcast television anchors covering it as a story in a minute or less. The actors’ performances are so organic that it is easy to imagine that these people really know each other and do not have lives outside this movie.
This cautionary tale is a rough ride. “The Coffee Table” offers a harsh lesson: enthusiastic consent or nothing otherwise victories become pyrrhic and soul crushing rendering life a solitary affair in a crowded room. While it is a superb film, it is the kind of film that will make you wonder if watching it is worth the cost. Though not a horror movie in the strictest sense, it may be the most harrowing film of 2024.
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As I thought more about “The Coffee Table,” original title “La mesita del comedor,” I realized that real life is worse than this bleak movie. The big spoiler is that Jesus accidentally kills Cayetano off-screen, presumably accidentally tripping with Cayetano landing on the vertical glass, which results in beheading. Maria would do the following: try to kill Jesus, completely forgive him or live. To be fair, it is a movie, so it has to be dramatic and maybe appropriately so when a parent is responsible for the death of a child, but in real life, life goes on.
People kill their kids all the time though not always in such a brutal fashion and in ways that are easier to excuse as an accident though it may not be. Currently the State of Arizona charged the unemployed Christopher Scholtes with second degree murder and child abuse charges for leaving his two-year old daughter, Parker, in a car on a 109-degree day because his two other children, 9 and 5, said that he did that to them regularly. Though his physician wife, Erika, is begging for leniency, her texts to her spouse confirmed the children’s account. So even though he almost killed their kids before and did kill one of them, this wife, who could be representative of a lot of women, would rather protect the man than the children by asking for no punishment, i.e. give him another shot to finish the job on the other kids. Because “The Coffee Table” is so effective, it is easy to forget that real life is bleaker.
