A horror film I swore I would never watch again finds its way back under the skin in this all-too faithful remake by Baskin director Can Evrenol. Anyone unlucky enough to have seen Caye Casas’s feel-bad masterpiece will likely have its imagery seared into the brain for the rest of their lives. With the cat already out of the bag (or the head under the chair, as it were), Evrenol’s The Turkish Coffee Table finds itself in a sticky situation – that scene is a once-in-a-lifetime shock. How on earth could Evrenol ever hope to replicate it?
The director’s approach is to go bigger, broader and madder, showing a bit more and twisting the knife far harder. The Coffee Table wasn’t exactly subtle in its black farce, but what it chose not to show was ultimately more disturbing than what it did depict. In contrast, Evrenol doesn’t shy away from many of the gorier details, stomping good taste and cinematic taboos into a bloody mulch on the rug.
It doesn’t always work (there’s one shot near the end where it really doesn’t work), but it’s a valid difference in approach which makes The Turkish Coffee Table stand out from the original edition. In terms of structure and story, much remains the same, as Ibrahim (Alper Kul) goes to increasingly ridiculous lengths to keep a lid on what he’s done. There’s an awkward family lunch to sit through and an obsessed downstairs neighbour making things more difficult. However, Evrenol seems less interested in basking in Ibrahim’s discomfort, instead amping up the surrealism and gruesome imagery until the black comedy of the situation becomes unignorable.
For the uninitiated, The Turkish Coffee Table will likely hit all the same buttons as its predecessor, scarring its audience for the very first time. That grisly shock doesn’t quite hit the same the second time around though, even if Evrenol does have fun (if ‘fun’ is the right word) in the build-up to that accident; toying with a futile sense of hope that things will play out differently this time around. And it’s in these flourishes where it’s at its most alive, playing up Ibrahim’s delirious guilt, or wife Zehra’s (Algi Eke) fiendish glee at his busted coffee table. Oh, if only she knew.
In Evrenol’s hands, The Turkish Coffee Table is the same horrifying beast, repackaged in a slicker, slightly shinier box. Where Casas’s version felt ugly and gritty, this one is bigger and more cinematic. If it struggles to hit all the same notes as the original film, that’s fine – I never want to feel the way that The Coffee Table made me feel for the first time again, anyway.
THE TURKISH COFFEE TABLE premiered at UK FrightFest Halloween on November 1, 2025.
