One of the many marks of a good dad is that when Dad is having a bad day, he continues to be a good dad. He’s duty-bound to nurture, protect, and offer strength to those he loves. His terrible day at work is, at least in terms of appearances, left at work. There’s no discernible “bleed-through” into homelife. The best fathers excel at compartmentalization. It takes mental discipline and adds stress on top of stress to make sure that the problems of elsewhere don’t infringe on keeping it together for the people we love. The love of a good father is undying. Which is also perhaps why those who never know this love don’t ever get over that absence. Still, accidents happen.
Caye Casas’s 2022 film The Coffee Table is about a singular day in the life of a father and a mishap that begins with an errand. Dad Jesús (David Pareja) and his wife María (Estefanía de los Santos) are at a store with their newborn first child, Cayetano, looking to buy a coffee table for their apartment in a high-rise building.
The pushy—and lonely—salesman (Eduardo Antuña) remarks that he has the same name as their baby boy. Ah, life’s amusing little coincidences. He comes across like a greasy Cliff Clavin with larger-than-life “facts,” touting the table he most wishes to move as indestructible, and as one knows, what matters most about a piece of furniture in front of your couch is whether it can survive a nuclear war or an alien’s disintegration ray.
The scene is smart, full of witty pep. We recognize Jesús as the romantic, the dreamer, the man who wants to be convinced rather than disabused, with María somewhat henpecking, but in the manner of someone tired who believes (rightly or wrongly) she’ll make it up to her other half on a better, brighter day without the to-do list. In the meanwhile, can we please just get through this as fast as possible without being fleeced?
But the coffee table is more than a coffee table to her husband. For him, it’s a symbol of his independence, his having a voice, and his desired status as an equal decision-maker as a spouse and parent. He digs in, and the assembly-line, not-unique-at-all coffee table is purchased. Dad is now to stay at home, put his table together, and watch the baby on his first afternoon alone with him, while Mom continues with further errands in advance of Jesús’s brother Carlos (Josep Maria Riera) and his much younger girlfriend Cristina (Claudia Riera) coming over later for supper and what promises to be a certain amount of tension under the best of circumstances.
No sooner is Jesús alone with little Cayetano than the accident occurs. It involves, of course, the indestructible coffee table, which proved to be anything but. Jesús knows what happened. Cayetano is now presumably forever unaware of anything happening, so he’s out of the loop. That leaves us, the audience, as the other party that knows what has occurred and is made to live with what becomes a secret for most of the film, including after María returns home and until Jesús unburdens himself to his brother, which doesn’t make anyone feel any better. There is also a neighbor girl named Ruth (Gala Flores) who pines for Jesús’s attention and affection and threatens to say he’s molested/raped her if these demands aren’t met, and a dog that is nerve-fraying in its investigative endeavors, especially when it comes to that which rolls under chairs.
You’ll encounter people who say they laughed the whole time they were watching this film. It’s probably best not to believe them and chalk this up to a form of attention-seeking, as in, “I can find the black humor in the blackest spots! That’s how with it I am! Won’t catch me flinching!”
The truth is that The Coffee Table will roil your stomach, keep you on a horrible, dagger-encrusted edge, and conceivably kill off your desire to procreate, or else bubble wrap everything in your living space upon taking baby home from the hospital. We’re reminded about how swift and unexpected death can be, such that in one instance life is “normal”—which itself smacks of an oxymoronic conceit—and in the next everything is different before the tea you just made has had a chance to cool.
In The Coffee Table, death begets death, and we understand why it may even need to. That’s a dangerous type of thinking, though. Because humans can continue through anything. We do have that possibility inside of us, including when it feels like continuing and enduring and living some form of life seems like the greatest of impossibilities. Try telling that to Jesús, though.
The Coffee Table is a film to see once (though, somehow, in what must number among the strangest remakes in horror-film history, because who thinks, “This needs to be done again,” Can Evrenol oversaw The Turkish Coffee Table in 2025). If you went over a friend’s place and they were watching it again as a regular feature of their video rotation, it might be time to reevaluate your relationship with them, or else think about having a hard talk if you’re a good friend yourself. “Look, brother, man, this ain’t healthy…” The Coffee Table isn’t cinematic comfort food but rather the meal you had once that you’ll never forget and don’t need to speak of that often, save to answer someone else by saying, “Yes, I’ve tried it.”
Being a dad is sometimes a formally thankless task, especially in a world whose inhabitants are increasingly closed in on themselves and communication skills are like withered berries on short branches that don’t bridge the gaps of the arbor, and what we have, when we have it, is often taken for granted. Things have a way of changing when we no longer do. We wish we’d thanked Dad more for loving us like he did, always being there for us, putting us first. Say it while you’re able to, kids, no matter how old you are.
Our sense is that new father Jesús was a good dad and would have become a better one as time went along—an ironic takeaway, given that on the day of these events, Dad had one big job above any others—the kind of job that even a henpecking wife doesn’t need to tell him to take care of—and, well, the job just didn’t get done. As for compartmentalizing—sometimes it can feel like the very possibility has flown out the window, never to return. But that’s part of being a dad—you do what you gotta do. 🩸
is the author of eight books, including the story collection, If You [ ]: Fabula, Fantasy, F**kery, Hope, a 33 1/3 volume on Sam Cooke’s Live at the Harlem Square Club, 1963, Meatheads Say the Realest Things: A Satirical (Short) Novel of the Last Bro, and a book about 1951’s Scrooge as the ultimate horror film. His work has appeared in Harper’s, The Atlantic, Rolling Stone, The New York Times, Vanity Fair, The Daily Beast, Cineaste, Film Comment, Sight and Sound, JazzTimes, The New Yorker, The Guardian, and many other venues. He’s completing a book called And the Skin Was Gone: Essays on Works of Horror Art. His website is colinfleminglit.com, where he maintains the Many Moments More journal, which, at 2.7 million words and counting as of autumn 2023, is the longest sustained work of literature in history.
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