Movie Spotlight: Sofa King

Matt hasn’t launched as an architect. Or as an adult, really. So he’s chosen the only logical response: he’s not moving from the couch.

Sofa King started as a stage play called Couch, performed off-Broadway in the early 2000s by writer Chris Mollica, who played Matt himself. Producer Ken Frank and Mollica had collaborated before, on Family Obligations, also on Relay alongside My Sister’s Wedding and How I Spent My Summer Vacation. The idea to adapt it into a film came from Frank’s daughter. “We were excited to revisit this project that had meant so much to us,” he says, “and bring it into a new time and a new medium with some new people.”

The everyman who won’t budge

Matt isn’t a slacker so much as a protestor. He sees the compromises adult life demands and decides, at least for now, to refuse them. “Most people probably feel that and come to terms with it out of necessity,” Frank says, “but his particular sensitivities make him want to protest.”

That’s what makes him useful as a center. Anyone can locate themselves in that feeling of being behind where they imagined they’d be. But Matt takes the feeling seriously enough to build a position around it, and that’s where the comedy and the weight start pulling in opposite directions.

The couch as shelter

The film finished just before the pandemic, and Frank is aware of how that timing looks. The couch represents home, comfort, control. The outside world is unpredictable, scary, full of demands Matt hasn’t agreed to meet. “I think Matt has this idea of sheltering in place to protect himself, and it’s a natural, understandable urge,” Frank says. The film doesn’t judge him for it. It just shows that someone left entirely alone isn’t his whole self either.

That tension sits at the heart of the story: how do you build a life that’s safe enough to live in and also demanding enough to grow in? Matt doesn’t have an answer yet. The couch is maybe the start of him looking for one.

Twelve thousand dollars and a clear vision

The budget was $12,000. That forced the film toward the weird and the wacky rather than away from it. Mollica adapted the play knowing they’d be working small and fast, so the challenge was how to open the material up anyway, through flashbacks, imagined sequences, puppets. Director Kevin Wolfring brought his own sensibility to that problem. “He had a very clear vision of how to unite the grounded moments and the surreal moments,” Frank says. The pace and the aesthetic end up matching the world the film is depicting.

It was shot in Floral Park, New York, where Wolfring grew up and went to school. Frank and Mollica grew up nearby. The setting carries that particular flavor of outer-borough New York, where the city is visible across the river but still feels like somewhere you’re about to leave for rather than somewhere you actually live.

A group of friends at the edge of something

The ensemble around Matt, Beth, Nikki, Shawn, Billy and the rest, functions as a set of types from that post-collegiate phase of life. The one climbing the ladder. The one keeping the group together. The one already halfway out the door. “It’s a group of friends who come to realize that they probably won’t make this whole journey together,” Frank says. “As you take certain paths, it might bring you further away from people you were once close with. That’s a hard lesson of adult life.”

The scene that crystallized all of it was Matt and Beth’s final exchange on the staircase. The whole film builds toward that moment. Beth has to take Matt seriously. For her to do that, he has to take himself seriously first. Getting that to land, tonally, was the hardest problem. Wolfring staged and paced it well enough that it moves straight from emotional truth into surreal flourish without breaking anything.

What to know before you press play

Frank wants you to lower the stakes before you press play. “Some low-stakes fun with friends is exactly what’s needed.” He’s someone who believes in the full range of what film can be: Citizen Kane and Space Jam as equally valid expressions of the form. Sofa King lives somewhere in that range, closer to the end where small moments and real friendships matter more than anything happening at the scale of the universe. In the Garage Productions has made seven features over the last decade. If this one gets you, there are more where it came from.

Comedy

---

Streaming now on Relay.