They say home is where the heart is, but domestic despair tends to be carried with you wherever you go, lingering like a spectre ready to emerge at the most inopportune moments. This is a realisation that many who have ever experienced any kind of familial strife, even only marginally, will immediately recognise as an unimpeachable truth, since it is clear that such challenges are not restricted to the household, and can infiltrate our day-to-day lives in unexpected and usually quite inconvenient ways. This is the foundation for the experiences of the characters in Mother, Couch, a film written and directed by Niclas Larsson, who set out to adapt the novel Mamma i soffa by Jerker Virdborg, which follows the story of a family confronted with a particular peculiar problem – while visiting a remote furniture store, their elderly mother sits down on a couch and quite simply refuses to move, stating that any attempt to forcibly remove her will have dire consequences. The story is told through the perspective of her youngest son David, who has to carry the weight of being the only one out of three children who seems to care enough about their mother’s wellbeing to try and determine the root of this newfound rebellion, despite her making it quite clear that he is an unwanted child, and that her insistence on staying put is indicative of something much deeper and more sinister, going back to his childhood. A strange film that is not always clear in terms of its motives or what it intends to say, but one that is nonetheless daring in both vision and style, Mother, Couch is a fascinating piece of postmodern storytelling and a terrific introduction to Larsson, who makes his feature-length debut with this abstract examination of trauma and emotional abuse, working from an already challenging text that he redefines into the form of a wildly daring dark comedy that is somehow both hilarious and deeply unsettling. This evolves into a perfectly off-beat and profoundly disturbing combination for a narrative that never quite makes sense but also ensures that we know every choice is deliberate and aimed at creating a specific atmosphere from which many strange ideas can emerge.

Mother, Couch is certainly not a pioneering film on the subject of dysfunctional families – in fact, as far as the themes at the heart of this film are concerned, Larsson was working within a set of ideas that have been done countless times before and remain prominent across the culture. The reason is that few subjects resonate with more intensity than stories of broken relationships between loved ones that are tinged with both dark humour and a sense of deep melancholy, since many of us have experienced the harrowing nature of familial conflict, whether it is in a fleeting moment or something more permanent. The director is openly adapting the novel in a way that only borrows the central storyline and its main themes, choosing to go in his direction, which is why it is difficult to determine just where the two visions diverge, despite them heading towards the same general direction. This is all to say that Mother, Couch is an example of a film taking a simple, common concept and developing it into something that borders on bespoke, all through taking a very unique approach that is built on infusing recognizable ideas with some philosophical and psychological concepts that aren’t normally found in the more straightforward leaps into this topic. The setup is quite obvious – this is a seemingly ordinary family, consisting of bickering siblings (some of which are more well-adjusted than others) who are only bound together by the duty that comes with caring for their ailing mother, whose eccentricities consistently keep them all on their toes. However, as the story progresses and we get to know these characters more, their backgrounds become clearer, as do the roots of trauma from which all of them – particularly the character of David – start to emerge, which shades in the more ambigious corners of the story and allows it to flourish into something quite remarkable, even if it can sometimes feel somewhat limited in scope, or not able to go as far as it perhaps could have with certain statements. Scathing comments pepper this film, coupled with devastating revelations that indicate the core of familial tension from which the film was working and actively filtering through a lens of almost perverse dark comedy, and demonstrate the sometimes harrowing depths to which the story is willing to descend to provide this wholly original depiction of a broken family.

However, the most important aspect to note about Mother, Couch is not its themes, but rather how it develops them, which it does through a slow and gradual deconstruction of a family dynamic through extremely unorthodox means. Unlike many absurdist works, which start relatively normally and then slowly descend into a state of existential chaos, this film starts at a point where everything is already somewhat offbeat and nonsensical. We’re thrown into the story, and given very little background to these characters or what they are searching for, with this information only emerging as the story progresses. Larsson has spoken openly about how this film represents a collision between cultures, being both quintessentially American in form and deeply European in culture, which we can find reflected in many of his stylistic and tonal decisions. The film is forged in the image of the many tremendous Scandinavian miserablist comedies that have defined that region of the world when it comes to their art, with the clinical, forthright manner of storytelling contrasting beautifully with the wry, sometimes surreal American charm that encapsulates the film. This is not an arbitrary decision – the story at the heart of Mother, Couch could simply not be told without some degree of surrealism embedded at the core, so it was immediately evident that a large portion of this film would be intentionally drawn from left-field, with the story itself being extremely odd at its most foundational level. Yet, it just becomes stranger as it progresses, almost to the point where we get to the moment where the plot entirely derails and we simply cease any effort to understand each plot point and its significance to the overall story, and instead simply just surrender to the madness that propels the entire narrative forward. Using absurdism as a means to plumb the emotional depths of this family and understand the roots of their trauma is a tricky endeavour, but it is one that Larsson manages to quite successfully execute, even when the film becomes unwieldy and it begins to lose a sense of clear direction – but in these moments, we simply just find ourselves wholeheartedly bewitched by the entire experience more than anything else, which is still extremely valuable as far as abstract artistic expression is concerned.

A text as dense and off-kilter as Mother, Couch demanded a cast that is willing to not only turn in performances of an exceptionally high calibre but brace the challenges of playing parts that are this complex and unconventional, which many would find too unwieldy to handle, especially with someone untested at the helm. The film is designed as a dense, complex character-driven drama filtered through the lens of existential absurdism, but it is still very much a chamber piece built around an ensemble of individuals, each one playing a specific archetype. Outside of a few characters on the periphery, there are half a dozen primary figures that define the film, and each of the actors playing the parts is exceptional. The anchors are Ewan McGregor as the long-suffering youngest son who seems to be the only person who sees the ridiculousness of the situation, and Ellen Burstyn as the titular matriarch who simply decides that she is going to step out of reality and embrace her sense of freedom, which we soon come to learn conceals something far more insidious. Joining them are the always reliable Rhys Ifans as the scruffy older brother, Lara Flynn Boyle (in her most memorable performance in years) as the first-born child, and the family’s resident trainwreck who is holding on by the narrowest of threads. Rounding out the cast are an extraordinarily talented Taylor Russell, who walks the fine line between charming and unsettling, and the wonderful F. Murray Abraham in dual roles, both actors bringing a sense of otherworldly surrealism to an already incomprehensible film. The cast of this film is very strong and helps elevate the material to exist at that perfect intersection between absurdity and gravitas. Special mention does have to go to Burstyn, who delivers a performance on par with the work she did earlier in her career, and despite her age, she is as dynamic and fearless today as she was at her peak, committing entirely to a difficult role and selling every minute. It’s difficult to imagine anyone else turning in nearly as brilliant a performance as her, and even if the film may be middling in other ways, she alone is an enormous highlight.

As the well-worn adage coined by Tracy Letts for August: Osage County (a wonderful companion piece to this film, particularly in how it contrasts a certain segment of American life with familial trauma), goes, “misery loves family” and rarely has this been more effectively implemented than in the fabric of Mother, Couch, a film that is extremely daring in how it provokes certain ideas and follows them through in a manner most unorthodox. Making sense of this film is not always easy, and we can even argue that it’s entirely impossible to understand, which is an intentional decision designed to give the viewer the experience of being alienated from a world that we simply are unable to navigate. It’s fascinating, offbeat storytelling that is driven by a sense of outlandishness that eventually starts to become more direct in what it aims to say, which is essentially that the idea of the perfect family is a fallacy, perpetuated by idealistic views that have never been truly implemented in any society, and that the moment one deviates from this supposed image of what a family should be, they are labelled as dysfunctional. Far from the most essential text on the matter, but certainly one of the most unique, Mother, Couch dares to be different, employing a unique tone and often quite an intrepid approach in terms of style, which is used to carefully piece this story together to create a wonderfully irreverent but also deeply disturbing account of a family derailing itself as a result of their matriarch’s decision to simply abandon her position in the hierarchy and leave her children to flail as they try to figure out the way forward after she absconds – and it all hints at some darker meaning that may force the film to end on quite a dour note, albeit one that we anticipated from the start. Off-kilter, unconventional and wickedly funny, being both outrageous and having a lot to say about some very common subjects, Mother, Couch is a fascinating film and one that will gradually grow in esteem as time progresses and more viewers discover its bewitching and surreal charms.