15/42
However, they have just become parents
Story
Jesus and Maria are a couple going through a difficult period in their relationship. To shape their new life, they decide to buy a new coffee table. A decision that will change their existence.
The entire film was shot over 10 days
Salesman: The glass is unbreakable, so your table will last forever. Appeared in Half in the Bag: Top 10 Horror Movies (2024) Part 1 (2024). Maria (Estefonia de los Santos) and Jesus Barobia (David Pareja) are the parents of a newborn baby named Cayetano.
The Coffee Table is a 2022 Spanish horror tragicomedy directed by Caye Casas, who co-wrote it with Cris Borobia
While they are going to buy a new coffee table, an argument breaks out between Maria and Jesus about the one displayed by the salesman and motivated by a repressed resentment, Jesus buys the table that will serve as the impetus for a hellish day. Casas has stated in interviews that he had an idea for a horror film that would draw more on real-life cruelty than traditional horror tropes like ghosts, killers, or monsters, and filmed the movie over the course of 10 days at a friend’s house on a shoestring budget. The film is one of those that is truly horrific in its depiction of horror, with an absolutely dark sense of humor mixed with a tragedy that is unwatchable and nauseating.
In many ways, the opening act is almost like watching the fuse of a bomb slowly burn to ignition, with the second and third acts taking us through the aftermath
I can’t say exactly what happens in the film because so much of the experience is simply watching how something as seemingly innocuous as a coffee table can lead to a sequence of events so terrifying that it turns into the worst possible scenario. Estefania de los Santos and David Pareja are very good as the leads, and they both do a good job of showing the couple that the more you get to know them, the more likely they are not to be together. This is a movie that will make your stomach churn, and while it’s certainly as bloody and ugly as the poster promises, the real horror lies in the implication that sometimes the worst horror isn’t an evil force, but the inevitable end result of seemingly harmless decisions that lead to horrific conclusions that are beyond imagination until you see them for yourself.
It would probably be an understatement to say that I enjoyed The Coffee Table, but at the same time I haven’t been able to get it out of my head for the past few days because it shocked me in a way that cut to the core of my being
It’s the kind of horror movie that’s less of a rollercoaster euphoria and more of a key that opens a Pandora’s box of existential dread that shakes you not only because you didn’t know it was there, but also because it felt colder and darker than you could have imagined.
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