Caye Casas’ first solo feature is a difficult film to review because its plot hinges on an unexpected and horrifying event early on. It’s doubly difficult as it’s currently on the festival circuit with no clear future in terms of wider distribution, making it hard to recommend since it isn’t certain when, or if, people will get to see it. It’s a dark, odd film too – not one that screams mass market appeal for a distributor, though the general good word of mouth from festival audiences will hopefully help it.
It’s this sort of conundrum that the film explores, when a situation can both freeze you in indecision and demand you to respond immediately, catching you in a trap that is unbearable no matter what you do or don’t do. It starts innocuously enough with a comic scene of a couple arguing over whether to buy the titular coffee table, the salesman calmly giving his pitch and working on the persuadable husband. While the husband is setting up the newly purchased table, the wife leaves the flat for a moment to get things for the dinner they are having with her relatives that evening.
Then the worst thing imaginable happens to the husband. We don’t see it, but we hear it and see the aftermath, and then we have to sit with him as he deals with the horrible feeling of inadvertently causing an accident that will nonetheless make you feel guilty for the rest of your life. As you can imagine, it’s an unbearable experience but Casas is able to smartly imbue the absurd tone of the opening scene into the rest of the film, where the darkness of the situation is tempered by the structure of farce.
Because as anyone would, when you do something that you know will upset someone, you try and cover it up the best you can and hope that ignorance is bliss – even as you know that when the consequences will finally catch up, there will be nothing but devastation. This doesn’t sound like a fun time and it isn’t, and I have never been more stressed out watching a film. But I was gripped, feeling a strange mix of schadenfreude, curiosity and extreme empathy – like when you’re looking at someone going through immense pain in a Saw trap and part of you thinks, “what would I do in that situation?”
The fun or horror, or in this case both, comes in not knowing which thing that could go wrong will go wrong.
The horror is in how innocuous it is, and so ordinary even when the stakes are truly life-destroying. I’m wary of repeating myself, so I’ll cover the other side of the coin – the way the tension breaks for comedy. Well, it doesn’t break the tension as there aren’t jokes per se since this is farcical comedy, where if things can go wrong, they will go wrong. The fun or horror, or in this case both, comes in not knowing which thing that could go wrong will go wrong, and there are red herrings as to where disaster will strike as the film takes sadistic pleasure in toying with audience expectations.
But it is possible to share in that pleasure as there’s humour in the awkwardness and the over reliance on small talk to cover mistakes, delaying the inevitable. I’m someone who sometimes finds awkward comedies more horrifying than funny, so when someone takes the structure of comedy but plays it predominately straight (see Breaking Bad), I find it fascinating and more fun to engage with. So even as I was squirming during The Coffee Table, I was having a great time being toyed with. Sometimes its nice to be treated as a manipulatable plaything by a director – after all, that’s how the characters on screen are being treated. Surely there’s no greater evidence for cinema as an empathetic medium than that.
The Coffee Table is out on digital plaforms from Second Sight Films (20th May)
