Ellen Burstyn sits on her sofa and refuses to move.
That’s it.
This is the absurd little concept fueling the debut feature of Nicalas Larsson debut feature, Mother, Couch (with an epic title btw). To try to get Mother (Ellen Burstyn) off the couch, David, Gruffudd, and Linda come together at a closing furniture store. While both Gruffudd and Linda seem content to either leave her there or call the police, David seeks to understand his mom’s motives, even as the need to see his family starts to boil over. It gets messier with the presence of the store owner (F.Murrary Abraham) and his daughter (Taylor Russell) whose behavior start to make David’s situation very surreal, causing him even more stress.
Couch doesn’t spell out for the audience what it is about, which is a bit contrary to my expectation of a more absurdist comedy rather than a surreal one. Instead, it starts to become feel almost book-like by presenting metaphors about halfway through the movie, making it increasingly clear that this film is not about reality. Much of this does not work on a first viewing and it doesn’t help that the film plays the first part of it very straight, never planting the seeds of the uneven nature of the world David inhabits.
It ultimately becomes a story about confronting your life as it is and seeing your family as the root of it. This film recognizes how much we get from our families and those closest to us, in the many ways that they ultimately define us. For much of the film, you get the feeling that David is staying with his mom to avoid his life at home but you start to see him take valuable lessons that he seemed to lack growing up. The film does have some comedic moments, even if it fails to make the most of what should be a really funny concept. Much of its humor comes from its weird world and the weird choices these characters end up making. The throughline of the theme is left mysterious to the audience for most of the first two acts, making the third even more confusing when it tries to create meaning out of its surreal ending.
Mother, Couch is playing at TIFF ’23. For more information, click here.
