The Big Picture

• The Coffee Table is a disturbing horror film that will make you feel sick for nearly 90 minutes.
• Director Caye Casas and co-writer Cristina Borobia drag you through extreme domestic depravity.
• The conclusion of the film feels like a respite but lacks emotional impact, wrapping up hastily.

There is no other horror film you’ll see this year as incessantly cruel and mean-spirited as The Coffee Table. This is both a compliment and a criticism, as, while the film is plenty committed to twisting the knife into its audience, it can also be rather repetitive before rushing to the finish. However, it is also painfully effective at making you feel sick to your stomach for nearly 90 minutes straight. Imagine the ill-fated drive in Hereditary was stretched to a feature, and you’ll start to get a sense of what’s in store for what feels destined to be one of 2024’s more disturbing horror films. Sure, there are plenty of gloriously bloody visions in upcoming works like In a Violent Nature or Cuckoo. Hell, even fantastical supernatural films like Oddity get incredibly dark before they tear you to pieces. The thing is that all of these films pale in comparison to the depravity that director Caye Casas and his co-writer Cristina Borobia drag you through.

The Coffee Table is an endurance test where you see how long both you and the characters can carry on without losing their heads. The precise details surrounding this are best left vague, as the whole point is the initial surprise of seeing everything fall apart and the stomach-churning descent that follows as we observe how someone can carry on pretending that they can put it back together again when we know that this is impossible. Like the most messed up nursery rhyme you could ever experience, sometimes Humpty Dumpty can’t be put together again, no matter how desperately we may want him to be. In this case, it’s something not only kids should not watch, but those who are parents themselves best proceed cautiously as well. As you watch a man's spirit being steadily shattered into a thousand pieces, yours may be broken as well.

What Is 'The Coffee Table' About?

This all begins with the couple of Jesús (David Pareja) and María (Estefanía de los Santos), who are out shopping for a coffee table. They have recently had a child after much trying and are now trying to make a home for themselves in a new apartment. Thus, when they bicker over their potential purchase while a deceptive salesman watches on, we get a sense that they are arguing about something more than just petty furniture. When Jesús eventually gets his way, purchasing the most tacky table you’ve ever seen and bringing it home, it seems like things are settling down. Of course, he realizes that he is missing one tiny part and thus sets the glass countertop at a perilous angle while María goes out of the store. Left alone with the newborn baby who has begun crying despite his best attempts to provide comfort, the camera creeps down the hallway before we hear the crash of the inevitable disaster strike in the next room. This inciting incident is merely the beginning of the range of emotions that follows. It is an experience that feels like being dragged across the glass that has now been scattered all over the floor while its central character tries to ignore what has rolled under a nearby piece of furniture. Out of sight is not out of mind.

If this sounds like a miserable experience, it very much is as The Coffee Table keeps beating you down with reminder after reminder of how devastating what happened was. Walking a chaotic tonal tightrope, the film also teases out the most pitch-black comedy as we hear characters discuss the importance of family and love while remaining blissfully unaware of how that will forever be out of reach. Taking place almost entirely in the apartment, it is all about placing us in the slow march toward realizing what happened while Jesús was alone in the apartment. Eventually, he will have to admit the truth and come clean about how, while it was an accident, he has done something that can never be undone. As you watch in agony, both leads give remarkable performances even as you feel revulsion starting to overwhelm you.

Pareja, in particular, is mesmerizing to watch. With sweat pouring down his face and deadness in his eyes, it is like we are watching a man whose soul has already gone even as his body continues to walk around. It is undoubtedly a horror film, but it is also about just watching a person fall apart before our eyes in the span of a condensed few hours that feels like an eternity. With claustrophobic closeups and punishing sound design making a more banal domestic scene into a nightmare, it never lets you forget for even a moment what has happened. Every line about coming together and a future that is now foreclosed to them cuts like a knife, slowly bleeding you dry of any hope. It’s relatively restrained about showing the horrors of what happened, but that only makes seeing the pain consuming the face of Jesús that much more agonizing. Even when some lines aren't quite as sharp as they could be, the execution of how everything is presented rips you apart.

'The Coffee Table' Ends Less With a Bang and More With a Whimper

The entire experience is unrelentingly exhausting, making the conclusion feel like both an overdue blessing in how quickly it wraps up and an odd respite considering all that had preceded it. This isn’t to say that The Coffee Table should have been more brutal, but several key moments feel contrived in a way that lessens the final blows. Be it the convenience of a door being left ajar or the arrival of another character who primarily exists to bring everything into the open, how it all comes spilling out is where the film stumbles just a bit.

The patience with which everything else played out is slightly lost as we then hurtle towards a finale that we could all feel was coming. Where we got to know little things about complicated character dynamics and the fault lines that will now be broken open in moments of desperation, this conclusion doesn’t let them linger for too long. Some of this may be out of its emphasis on realism, as real tragedy is not often defined by fulfilling narratives, though a forced final shot breaks this in a way that indicates it was struggling to reach for something more emotional. That it didn’t quite grasp this doesn’t take away from the film writ large as it still lands with a heavy weight on your chest. If only he hadn’t gotten that damn table.

The Coffee Table is now in theaters in the U.S. Click below for showtimes near you.

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