The members of a dysfunctional family find themselves mysteriously trapped in an antiquated furniture store when their elderly matriarch suddenly refuses to get up from one of the display couches....
The feeling that flooded over me when the end credits of “Mother, Couch” rolled was one of agitation and sheer annoyance. I felt like writer/director Niclas Larsson strung me along for two hours, only to leave me unfulfilled with a story that never really went anywhere. A movie that ends in frustration is a red flag that something has gone horribly wrong with the project, and the tone, surrealism, and overall existential themes just don’t work here.
Based on the 2020 Swedish novel Mamma i soffa by Jerker Virdborg, the film tells the story of an elderly woman who refuses to get up from a sofa in a local furniture store. Mother (Ellen Burstyn) has taken residence on a green couch and won’t budge. Desperate, a store employee (Taylor Russell) calls her three estranged adult children for help. David (Ewan McGregor), Gruffudd (Rhys Ifans), and Linda (Lara Flynn Boyle), who don’t see much of each other these days, arrive on the scene to figure out why their mother is being so stubborn. Family truths and long-buried mysteries are unearthed as the siblings do everything in their power to get the old woman to leave the store.
The story hook is good, but there’s no payoff. Although blessed with a talented cast who all give good performances, the characters are so flawed that they’re unlikable. The set-up is painfully slow, and the first half of the movie is laborious and uninteresting. Larsson takes far too long to reveal the story elements with his insistence to only drop a trail of tiny crumbs that aren’t meaty enough to satiate even the least voracious viewer.
I guess to that end, the film is more about the mood than the narrative. It’s a family trauma drama about ethics and character, including the freedom that comes from cutting painful emotional ties and moving on with your life. It’s a story about the literal letting go of a toxic relationship and forgiving an awful mother (although some people don’t deserve the extension of kindness). It’s challenging to say the least, especially with the indirect way in which Larsson goes about raising the more interesting questions like what does it mean to be someone’s child or someone’s parent?
The film is quite similar to the far superior “Beau is Afraid,” and it’s too bad that “Mother, Couch” goes about telling its comparable story in such a long-winded, abstract way.
