When we meet spouses Jesús (David Pareja) and Maria (Estefanía de los Santos), they’ve got a brand-new baby and are arguing over a brand-new table in a furniture store. Under the protest of his much older wife, Jesús picks one made of bronze, ivory and an “unbreakable” slab of glass. And thus begins The Coffee Table.
It sounds like a joke — the IKEA instructions-inspired opening credits sequence suggests as much — but I assure you, the poster’s phrasing of “a cruel Caye Casas film” is not a marketing conceit.
No spoilers here: A moment at the 20-minute mark will divide audiences — and not necessarily into nice, clean halves. Just as something really, really bad feels like it will happen, it does. We don’t see the horrific act; worse, we feel it.
At this point, The Coffee Table holds immense potential at becoming the darkest of dark comedies; Casas (Killing God) and his co-screenwriter, Cristina Borobia, need only go one way: all in.
But they don’t. Instead, almost apologetic at having gone so far so soon, they shift the tone into the realm of familial/relationship drama, as Jesús spends the rest of the movie trying to keeping the lid on What Transpired from Maria. Your nerves remain jangled, jarred and wracked, yes — and performances strong — but the Spanish film simply isn’t the same.
Until the ending, when Casas leaps out of the corner he’s backed himself into as everything — and I do mean everything — comes to a head. —Rod Lott