Genre Comedy

THE SOFA (2017)

Item: THE SOFA
Rating: 3.0
Author: Ross McLaren

★★★ — THE SOFA (2017)

Sometimes a film's description alone is enough to make you sit up straight. That was me with The Sofa, a Moldovan short I tracked down as part of my A-Z World Movie Tour. I read what it was about and thought: yes, this is going to be something. I'm glad to say I wasn't wrong.

It's funny, it's whimsical, and it has a warmth to it that catches you off guard in the best possible way. The premise, whatever your expectations going in, delivers on them. There's a lightness of touch here that a lot of short filmmakers struggle to find. Getting comedy and genuine feeling to coexist in a short runtime without either undercutting the other is harder than it looks, and The Sofa mostly pulls it off with a grin on its face.

I say mostly, because there's a pacing issue I can't quite ignore. Some of the driving shots feel like padding, like the film is stretching itself out when it would be better served by tightening up. It's not fatal, but it does give you a moment or two where you're checking in rather than being swept along. Trim those out and you'd have something close to a perfect little short. As it stands, it's a very good one with a small amount of fat that could have been cut.

What lingers, though, is the ending. There's a deliberate ambiguity to how things wrap up, a suggestion that the whole adventure might not have been entirely real. I know some people will read it that way. I choose not to. I choose to believe every bit of it happened, because the film earns that reading just as much, and it's the more joyful conclusion. A short that leaves you making that choice, and caring enough to make it, has done something right.

Moldova wasn't a cinema I knew anything about before this tour, so I was coming in completely cold. I've been pleasantly surprised by some of the corners of world cinema this project has pointed me towards, and The Sofa sits comfortably in the "worth your time" column. It's available to watch free on Vimeo (link above), so there's genuinely no barrier. It's twenty-odd minutes of your evening and it'll leave you smiling.

Three stars. Warm, entertaining, a touch overlong, but very much worth a watch.

Rating: ★★★ | Year: 2017 | Watched: 2025-07-20

View on Letterboxd →

Related on Movies With Macca

American Beauty (1999)

By the close of the 1990s, Hollywood had developed a particular appetite for a certain kind of film: the suburban discontentment drama, polished and wry, wearing its cynicism about the American dream like a badge of sophistication. American Beauty, released in September 1999, arrived near the peak of that wave

The Spiral Staircase (1946)

Released in 1946 by RKO Radio Pictures, The Spiral Staircase arrived at a moment when Hollywood was finding its appetite for shadows. The postwar years had produced a run of crime pictures and psychological thrillers that leaned into moral ambiguity and visual darkness, and this film sits comfortably within that

The Babadook (2014)

Horror cinema has always been a useful vehicle for anxieties that polite conversation tends to avoid, and The Babadook arrived in 2014 wearing that tradition proudly. Written and directed by Jennifer Kent, it is an Australian production brought together through a collaboration between Causeway Films, Screen Australia, the South Australian

The Peanuts Movie (2015)

Charles M. Schulz's Peanuts comic strip ran from October 1950 until February 2000, the final instalment published the day after Schulz himself died. Over those five decades it became one of the most widely syndicated strips in history, appearing in thousands of newspapers across dozens of countries and

Film images and data courtesy of TMDB. This product uses the TMDB API but is not endorsed or certified by TMDB.

THE SOFA (2017)

Read more

American Beauty (1999)

The Spiral Staircase (1946)

The Babadook (2014)

The Peanuts Movie (2015)

The films worth your time, once a week.