Cam Sehpa

(The Turkish Coffee Table)

Where Melodramatic Chaos Meets Family Tension and Darkly Comic Bad Decisions.

When it comes to remaking films—especially such recent ones—a healthy dose of skepticism is natural.

Despite my admiration for Can Evrenol (“Baskin,” “Sayara”), I cannot deny I had my doubts. However, mere minutes into “Cam Sehpa” (“The Turkish Coffee Table”)—a Turkish adaptation of Caye Casas’ 2022 Spanish psychological horror-drama “La Mesita del Comedor”—my concerns vanished.

Evrenol retains roughly 90% of the core narrative but injects his own singular vision and stylistic approach. Rather than simply replicate the original, he transforms it into an unsettling Turkish drama-soap opera, infused with family melodrama and a surprisingly more natural light–colour palette.

This unique framing preserves the tension of Casas’ material while introducing a sharper layer of dark humour designed to elicit hysterical, guilty laughter. It’s comedy rooted in escalating emotional frenzy and in the tragic triviality of the cause versus the horrific outcome we know is coming.

This added humour leaves you feeling even more complicit, as the audience is held firmly in place, laughing nervously at a snowballing tragedy born from a mere consumer decision—implicating us in the couple’s absurd horror.

Where Casas’ original script focused squarely on stress and anxiety, Evrenol shifts his gaze. He dedicates more screen time to the family dynamics between the wife, the husband, and the newborn, allowing the domestic tensions to simmer more overtly.

The film is punctuated by strikingly specific, blood-drenched, wrinkled imagery and culminates in a hyper-grotesque third act—perfectly encapsulated when Ibrahim breaks the fourth wall and whines, I want this to be over! And we are right there with him.

This interpretation will likely be divisive for audiences who cherished Casas’ “La Mesita del Comedor,” but Evrenol is a filmmaker of eerie vision, and he proves he knew precisely what he was doing here.

His cinematic methodology thrives on pure incursions of grotesque chaos into the domestic world, often resorting to extreme imagery and uncomfortable comic horror.

“The Turkish Coffee Table” opens with the couple and their baby (who has far greater visibility in this adaptation) at an antiquated furniture shop. The husband, Ibrahim (Alper Kul), wants to purchase a coffee table—the single noteworthy decision in an apartment otherwise entirely designed by his wife, Zehra (Algi Eke).

Their bitter dispute over the aesthetically hideous object, played out in front of a hapless saleslady, immediately sows the seeds of a dysfunctional relationship and highlights the immense difficulties of being new parents.

The toxic dynamic is instantly established. For viewers familiar with the original, you will surely appreciate this moment, which also introduces the soap-opera humour that permeates the film.

Kul and Eke perfectly perform the intense, suffocating pettiness of their relationship, providing the dramatic engine for the ensuing chaos.

This paradox—where bad taste begets catastrophic decisions—is arguably Evrenol’s most significant addition, successfully cementing “The Turkish Coffee Table” as a remake that has genuinely found its own unique, deeply unsettling voice.

Using his own cinematic charms, Evrenol keeps the core narrative intact while adding rich layers of melodramatic chaos.

“Cam Sehpa” (“The Turkish Coffee Table”) comes highly recommended—both for fans of the original “La Mesita del Comedor” and for newcomers who appreciate extreme imagery and bold comic horror.