Film Review: "The Coffee Table" (2022)

By Madeline Trice

Jesús (David Pareja) ascending the steps of his apartment building with the titular table in tow

Caye Casas’ “The Coffee Table” (La mesita del comedor) is a Hitchcockian comedy of errors, complete with an ominous ascension of stairs and a premise just a hop, skip, and a jump from “Rope” (1948). In his second full-length film following “Killing God” (2018), Casas shows the worst possible day in a parent’s life and begs viewers not to look away, maybe even to laugh—maybe. I won’t say definitively if the movie was or wasn’t funny, to each their own, but I think what’s important is that the movie wants to be funny. 

The film centers on María (Estafanía de los Santos) and Jesús (David Pareja), a contentious couple grappling with the shift in their relationship brought by their newborn baby and Jesús’ taste in furniture. It’s difficult to speak toward the premise without saying too much. Casas makes the bold decision of laying everything out on the table (so to speak) in the first twenty minutes of the film like he’s setting up dominos, then proceeds to sweep them under an armchair and leave you waiting for the next hour before letting them fall. 

María (Estafanía de los Santos) left, and Jesús (David Pareja) on the right

It's hard to say there’s much tension in the film. One can predict from the very beginning when the camera jumps from a close up of María’s face while giving birth to a scene of her and Jesús bickering over the purchase of the coffee table, where the story is going. Every move Casas makes is telegraphed from the very start, but instead of being a source of tension or comedy, this central dramatic irony makes the viewer cringe. Jesús, the perspective character, is in on what’s happening along with the viewer and it’s as though his experience of this dramatic irony is what we are intended to experience rather than our own. 
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The only one in on the “joke,” Jesús is tortured as he sits through a lunch party with his unwitting wife, his brother Carlos (Josep Maria Riera), and Carlos’ girlfriend Cristina (Claudia Riera). The greater part of this film is just watching Jesús suffer (Mel Gibson eat your heart out) for being the only one in the know—​and it drags. The first twenty minutes of the movie are bizarre, surreal, and very nearly funny, and the last ten minutes hit hard, fast, and larger than life, but that middle hour of the film felt like it could have been fifteen minutes. While Casas utilizes a small space and a lot of dynamic angles and close-up shots to maintain a claustrophobically tight focus, and the almost campy sound design works to emphasize the horror and comedy of the spectacle, the story quickly loses steam and starts feeling like an exercise in gratuity.

Carlos (Josep Maria Riera) left, and Cristina (Claudia Riera) on the right

I’m sure there will be those who disagree and say this movie rolled for the full hour and a half, some things come down to taste, but where this movie really lost me was its depiction of women. From Jesús’ perspective his wife stifles him, preventing him from having any agency or identity for himself, the coffee table being the only decision he’s been allowed to make in a decade he jokes. Meanwhile the women in the film all seem to feel similarly about their children. María, Cristina, and the two other minor characters we meet, the upstairs neighbor and the friend at the supermarket, all speak about having children like it’s the most important thing a woman can do with her life. The two minor characters even speak of their teenage daughters as if raising them is an all-consuming task that leaves no time for self, as if daughters do to mothers what, in Jesús’ eyes, wives do to husbands. The most off-putting part of the movie, though, has to be the inappropriate relationship Jesús has with his thirteen-year-old neighbor and the way the narrative paints this grown man as the victim of the manipulative little girl. 

​Looking at Casas’ previous films its clear he’s interested in interrogating familial structures, but if the misogyny present in the film’s depiction of women is meant to be a product of Jesús’ subjective lens as the perspective character, it isn’t communicated or commented on by the narrative in a clear enough way to be anything other than a gratuitous hat on a hat for an already excessively edgy plot. A lot of the talk around this movie wants to warn the viewer about the suffering that takes place and the visceral nature of what happens on screen, but I believe what’s really going to turn away viewers is the slow drag dominating two-thirds of the film and the misogyny that’s been made both central, and yet, almost entirely superfluous to the plot.

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