I didn’t realize what an interesting year in horror 2022 actually was until I checked to see what horror films were making headlines while The Coffee Table was circulating film festivals. 

Turns out, 2022 had a tidal wave of great female driven stories, as seen through titles like Pearl, Fresh, Barbarian, Sissy, Bodies, Bodies, Bodies, Hellbender and Huesera: The Bone Woman.

We also got a fantastic horror comedy in Deadstream, an impressive horror romance in Bones and All and a found footage horror in Incantation was deemed so scary, it became a TikTok challenge. And for those slasher fans, Art the clown made his second…well really his third…appearance in a feature film.

But outside of three breathtaking Mia Goth’s performances- two courtesy of a dual role in X– what really, really blew my mind in 2022 were the more experimental horrors like Skinamarink and You Won’t Be Alone– two films that really push the limits of what horror actually is. 

And considering most of these films were filmed under strict pandemic protocols, causing many of them to work with small casts and limited locations, I’d say the year turned out a sizable amount of quality horrors.

With all that going on, I’m not surprised that the Spanish dark comedy The Coffee Table, a film should have a ton of appeal to fans of modern, adult horror, got a little lost in the shuffle. And if I’m being honest, I hadn’t even heard about this film until a video about how disturbing it is showed up in my YouTube feed. I didn’t watch that video. Instead, I typed “coffee table film” into the search bar only to learn that many others had made similar videos. That’s when I suspected that I had just discovered a winning horse, shelled out the $4 to rent The Coffee Table in the iTunes store (yes, that still exists) and about 30 minutes after learning about it I was watching it in my basement.

Look, I’m a pretty desensitized guy, so I’m not going to just agree that The Coffee Table was the most disturbing film of 2022, especially cause I remember the effect Skinamarink had on me. But it is, by all accounts, an extremely tense experience and it is as good, if not better, than a lot of those great horrors I’ve already named in this review. How this got left off so many year-end best of lists is beyond me, though I suspect that it just wasn’t seen by enough eyeballs at the time- except maybe in Spain where it won a few awards. Now, after a brief 2024 international theatrical release and a big push from influencers, particularly on TikTok and YouTube, this problem seems to be correcting itself in mass as I write this.  

So now that the film has been kind of highjacked by 2024, it will be interesting to see how many year-end best of lists The Coffee Table will find itself on. Better late than never I suppose.

The Coffee Table starts with Jesús (Davis Pareja), a husband and new father, insisting on buying a tacky coffee table motivated in part by the fact that his wife, Maria (Estefanía de los Santos), hates it. Maria had recently named their boy Cayetano after her grandfather even though Jesús doesn’t like the name, so his insistence on getting this table acts as a form of revenge, though it is implied that he might actually like the table as well.

Sensing the coming commission, the salesman says anything he can to close the deal. Amongst other claims, he tells the couple that the table has power to change lives for the better and that its glass is indestructible. 

So Jesús drags the coffee table home.

Later, Maria goes shopping for Jesús’ brother’s upcoming visit, leaving her husband alone to take care of Cayetano for the first time. That is when Jesús learns in the most horrific way imaginable that neither of the salesman’s fanciful claims about that damned coffee table were true.  

The Coffee Table is director Caye Casas’ second feature. His first, named Killing God, is about God visiting a group of four people during the holidays to tell them that in the morning everyone in the world is going to die and they are to pick two people within their group to be the only survivors. So yeah, Casas knows a thing or two about making a dark comedy.  

But the horror in The Coffee Table does not come from an encounter with the supernatural. Jesús’ mistake is just a tragic accident that could potentially happen to anyone dealing with the stress of a newborn. But his cowardly, non-confrontational personality only compounds the tragedy- as he chooses to delay his inevitable reckoning by keeping Maria ignorant of the horrible truth. 

Regardless of how you feel about the underlying cruelty that sits at the heart of the film’s premise, there can be no denying that The Coffee Table is a masterclass in verbal irony. The words Maria and the dinner guests, Carlos and Cristina, mutter are racked full of humour and pathos in equal measure. It is a magnificent feat.  

There is also a simplistic and painful beauty to Casas’ film. It is extreme in its content without ever needing to be visually graphic. In fact, the most goriest images are left for our imagination, which in this case is for the best. 

At the same time, The Coffee Table is able to make some astute observations about relationships drifting apart and the false hope that becoming new parents can bring for reconcilation. Parja and de los Santos do an excellent job making us empathize with their doomed characters dispute their obvious flaws, and this makes their spiral downwards all the more tragic. 

The Coffee Table is also a testament to how one bad decision can snowball into so many others.

And though the story is far more conventional than those 2022 experimental horrors- Skinamarink and You Won’t Be Alone– The Coffee Table is another example of a film that challenges our understanding of what horror truly is, showing us a domestic situation that for any parent is far more anxiety-inducing than serial-killers or things that go bump in the night. 

But The Coffee Table’s crescendoing tension is all for naught if Casas can’t deliver on the climax. Fortunately he has an ace up his sleeve to ensure that The Coffee Table‘s ending is every bit as monstrous as it needed to be. Well done!

The Coffee Table’s sudden surge in popularity shows the power of social media to unearth hidden gems. As I can attest, all you got to do is label something as “the most disturbing” and people will inevitably flock to it. It’s human nature, which is something Casas was probably banking on when he co-wrote this film.

I look forward to his next project. Hope its just as vile.