The Turkish Coffee Table (Cam Sehpa) had its UK première at Halloween Frightfest, 1st Nov 2025
The clue is in the title. Can Evrenol’s The Turkish Coffee Table (Cam Sehpa) is not just a remake, but a relocation, of Caye Casas’ The Coffee Table (La mesita del comedor, 2022). Even if the first thing that we hear in the film is the sound of a baby crying – a sound that will certainly not dominate the rest of the film, despite the importance of little newborn Nusret to the plot – the first thing that we see is a glass of Turkish tea with a cube of sugar being stirred into it. The structure of the film is broadly the same, but the new Turkish setting for these original Spanish materials brings its little differences. For like the titular coffee table, absurdly described by saleswoman Mrs Çilem (Hatice Aslan) to new parents Ibrahim (Alper Kul) and Zehra (Algi Eke) as Neo-Ottoman in style but Italian in design, this film is an amalgam of different cultures. A hand injury, for example, that the long-suffering Ibrahim later acquires may resemble a Christian stigma, but this is a Muslim family, and Zehra, more conservative than the other women in the film, always wears a headscarf when in the company of anyone other than just her husband.
Even the table itself is different, decorated this time not with naked women in faux gold, but with equally hideous silver stallions, perhaps representing the freedom – and the virility – that Ibrahim feels he has lost since becoming, without ever planning it, a father to Nusret. Ibrahim is insistent on purchasing this truly tacky item of furniture, with its supposedly “shatterproof” glass top, in part to stave off his sense of emasculation and to reintroduce an element of agency. After all, the way Ibrahim sees it, Zehra has decided on their wedding arrangements, their highrise apartment’s decorations and everything else – so buying this table, which Zehra hates, is his rather pathetic way of reasserting a little control.
“It’s just a glass coffee table, love,” Ibrahim says as he bickers with Zehra, “We are having this conversation only because of a glass coffee table.” For this item, though not quite a metaphor, becomes the vehicle and medium through which the couple modulates, indeed ‘tables’, their feelings and power dynamics, and when its “unbreakable” glass actually does break, so – in slow-motion – does this family, coming apart under the weight of Ibrahim’s dissociative shock, denial and a genuine love for his wife and little son which now cripples him. Really from the very moment, early on, that the table’s glass fractures, this family’s fate is sealed, the writing is on the wall, and the rest of the film is just excruciating deferral of the inevitable, leading Ibrahim near the end – in an irrationally reflexive moment not in Casas’ original – to declare, “I want this film to be over.” By this point, the battered, emotionally shattered viewer will feel the same.
The Turkish Coffee Table may be a domestic tragedy, but it comes in the guise of a comedy. It is not just the casting of Kul – a fixture (380 episodes!) for over a decade of Turkish television’s weekly sketch-based Güldür Güldür Show – in the lead rôle, but also the film’s farce-like structure. For as Ibrahim faces – and struggles, in his traumatised state, to process – the unspeakable horror that has occurred in Apartment 18, other characters keep coming and going, obliviously interrupting his attempts to conceal what has happened or to commit suicide.
Çilem from the furniture store, and erotomaniac, wilfully home-wrecking 17-year-old Sibel (Elif Sevinç, star of Evrenol’s 2019 feature The Girl With No Mouth) from the apartment downstairs, both arrive with amatory designs on Ibrahim, and a crazed determination to turn this film into an adultery comedy. Ibrahim’s brother Cihan (Özgür Emre Yildirim) comes bringing his new fiancée Ece (Ece Su Uçkan) and some happy news. It all should be funny – and in the blackest of ways, it is – but in the eye of this comic storm is Ibrahim, who alone, but for the viewer, knows the harrowing catastrophe that is coming, and that will bring this family plummeting to its ruin.
From the opening in the furniture store, Ibrahim has been trying to assert a control that he does not have – hence his insistence on buying a table that so overtly disgusts Zehra. Back in the apartment, that same dynamic will play out in a broader karmic frame, as Ibrahim seeks to do everything in his non-existent power to put off the moment of a revelation that he knows cannot be avoided, and so unravels before us with this very knowledge of his own impotence, in a sequence of unfortunate events ultimately beyond his control.
Maybe if Ibrahim had not bought that coffee table, or if all the screws had been included in the table’s packaging, or if the living-room rug had not been left hazardously kinked, or if Zehra had trusted her instincts not to leave Ibrahim briefly alone with the baby, or even if Ibrahim had had a better relationship with his father, things would be different. Indeed, in Evrenol’s rewritten script, things are different – all the names have been changed, the milieu and manners are now thoroughly Turkish, the central accident is shown more graphically (which is to say, with less vain hope of a better outcome), we are given visual access to Ibrahim’s dark inner ideations, Ece is no longer worryingly younger than Cihan, and the details of the ending have been significantly modified, though remaining unhappy.
Yet here the very process of adaptation itself instantiates the film’s bleak message: for despite our every effort and intervention to alter our allotted, indeed scripted fate, some of our experiences simply lie beyond our control, and are immutable; and no matter how we fill our running time in this life, the end will always be essentially the same and, though accommodating some delay, cannot be put off forever. In short, the names, the environment and other particulars might change, but there are limits to how much the underlying story can be rewritten.
strap: Can Evrenol’s remake builds excruciating, darkly funny tension from a family’s ruin deferred and a prescribed tragedy rewritten
© Anton Bitel
