"The Coffee Table": Spanish Indie Horror Hits at Home

“The Coffee Table,” a nifty horror movie brought to this shores thanks to Cinephobia Releasing, offers the perfect excuse to ponder Spain’s knack for chilling your blood with film. It’s not by chance that Spanish cinema enjoys fertile ground for horror. From the Inquisition to the Civil War, there’s plenty of history to inspire any fearmonger with creativity. Blocked filmmakers can always walk to the Prado Museum and catch some inspiration by watching Goya’s Black Paintings. Trust me, Saturn Devouring His Son gives George Romero and his peers a run for their money. It’s pure nightmare fuel.

A Brief History of Spanish Horror

During almost four decades of dictatorship led by Francisco Franco, artists from any discipline could always look outside their window to see something awful and get the creative juices running. One caveat: the regime exerted iron-clad control over the media and entertainment sphere. Dubbing foreign films was an easy way to silence unwanted ideas. Just change the lines, and you’re good to go, lip-synching be damned! Creatives would take refuge in fantasy and allegory, whichever way they could circumvent censors. The prolific Jess Franco began his reign of exploitation and Euro-sleaze in the early ’60. Sex and violence did not bother the prudes in power. In the late ’70, Narciso Ibáñez Serrador rode the unbridled freedom of the Post-Franco years. The aftershocks of La Movida fueled the satyrical punk sensibility of Alex de la Iglesia through the ‘90s and beyond. The Aughts brought franchise filmmaking like “REC” (Balagueró & Plaza, 2007), unleashing zombies in Madrid with a little inspiration from American indie phenomena like “The Blair Witch Project” (Myrick & Sánchez, 1999). 

"The Coffee Table": a Horrifying Piece of Furniture

“The Coffee Table” (Caye Casas, 2022) hints at the future, or rather, the present. The indie ethos manifests in concept, execution, and setting: few characters, even fewer locations, and modest aesthetics. For all we know, director Caye Casas could have shot most of this movie at his apartment. The characters’ preoccupations are personal and intimate but universal. This tragedy could happen anywhere.

We meet Jesus (David Pareja) and María (Estefanía de los Santos) one morning as they quarrel at a cavernous furniture store. A pathetic salesman (Eduardo Antuña) is pushing them to buy a horrendous coffee table made out of two naked women painted in gold, holding a plank of “unbreakable” glass. María hates it, Jesús loves it. They bicker as she holds newborn baby Cayetano in her arms. Jesús prevails and buys the cursed object. They all will regret this banal action. It’s a busy day. Jesus’ brother Carlos (Josep María Riera) and his younger girlfriend Cristina (Claudia Riera) are coming later to meet the baby. Maria goes to the supermarket while Jesús stays in to assemble his table. 13-year-old neighbor Ruth (Gala Flores) hovers outside the door, ready to bring chaos to the party. 

Jesús and María belong to post-Franco Spain. Peace and political stability allow them to concentrate on their personal and material well-being. They had problems conceiving, but now, in middle age, they can say their family is complete. Also, they are nesting in a well-appointed apartment inherited from a late grandmother. María has taken over the redecorating, leaving Jesus out of the loop. His insistence on getting the table comes from bad taste and an attempt to claim some degree of agency. It seems like she decides everything about their lives.  

We don’t know what they do for a living, but we gather that the comforts of the middle class are important to them. The gloomy but spacious apartment, the furniture store, and the supermarket define their universe. Three locations are enough. When everything looks settled, an unexpected event changes things for the worse. I have to tiptoe around this development because it would go into the history books as the mother of all spoilers. It changes the course of the characters’ lives forever. It’s a taboo-breaking twist. At least it happens early enough, so you won’t be holding your breath for long. 

The Ghost of Subtext

Very often, horror movies operate as morality plays. It’s not by chance that in the classic slasher films, the sexually active vixens were easy prey, and the virtuous virgin ended up as the Final Girl who sends the boogeyman to the great beyond - at least, until a sequel came along. The maneuver comes from the days of the Hays Code: you satisfy the public’s prurient interest for exposed young flesh while coping out to close with exemplary punishment. That will show them! Drop your knickers and pay with your life. 

“The Coffee Table”’s characters are pretty much innocent. Their foibles are as mundane as being relatable. If anything, they are guilty of bothering each other a bit. They are not even into materialism too much. The movie hints at a particular strain of bad behavior but does not punish the characters for it. It’s there to provide extra frisson to the central issue: when will the gruesome event come to light, and what will happen then?  

You, like me, might end up grasping at straws looking for subtext. Check out the main couple’s names: Jesus and Maria. The Son of God and his mother, according to Christianity. Actor David Pareja even has a beard and long locks, similar to the ones that adorn Jesus' representation in Western art and religious imagery. That’s as far as that idea goes. If anything, he suffers like Job. There is nothing more beyond the surface. Still, within its literal limits, the movie works as a canny exercise in suspense. The actors provide excellent performances, deepening the movie’s effect. Pareja is something of a poster boy for Spanish horror indies. He was aces as the caretaker of a disabled friend in the dark comedy “Amigo” (Óscar Martín, 2019). That movie is of a piece with “The Coffee Table.”

I had never seen Estefanía de los Santos before, but her performance hits you like a bolt out of nowhere. The character is always in danger of becoming a one-note shrew, but she turns into a well-rounded person. You feel for her and understand her frustrations. We know that losing patience with her husband is not her entire personality. After all, the movie begins with Maria giving birth, strenuously going through contractions. The woman deserves a break. De los Santos’ whiskey-and-molasses raspy voice is quite an instrument, which she deploys with admirable ease, whether to signal exasperation or disdain. 

The arrival of brother Carlos and his girlfriend Cristina carries a surreptitious dose of perverse irony - earlier in the day, María describes him as a “pedo” because the middle-aged man is dating an 18-year-old girl. How this information resonates with Jesus is a misdirection, but it does not end up being detrimental to the narrative integrity of the movie. Once all the pieces fall where they may, you realize “The Coffee Table” could not end any other way. It’s like a horrifying O’Henry story or one of “Roal Dahl’s Tales of the Unexpected” - in print or TV. 

Perhaps it’s best to connect it to a Spanish reference point: Narciso Ibáñez Serrador’s anthology TV series “Tales to Keep You Awake.” Severin edited a Blu-ray with restorations of the 28 episodes produced over three seasons, two from the ‘60s and one from the ‘80s. This edition does not include a recent revival, which recruited top directors to remake eight classic episodes and ran for two seasons from 2021 to 2022. Catch “The Coffee Table,” but don’t hold it against me. You have been warned.

• “The Coffee Table” opens in Los Angeles theaters on April 19, with more cities to follow. It will be available on home video and VOD on May 14, 2024.