Mother, Couch doesn’t believe in a gentle leadup or easing viewers into its bizarre premise. Instead, it knocks you out of a plane with a hammer, letting you crash land in a world that only masquerades as the one we’re familiar with. On a grand scale, it’s a movie about familial trauma, loneliness, and the desperation that comes with trying to make your family be what you wish it were. On a more literal level, it’s about a mother who won’t stop sitting on a couch inside a furniture store.

David (Ewan McGregor) and his brother Gruff (Rhys Ifans) have brought their mother (Ellen Burstyn) to a furniture store in search of a dresser when she settles herself on an expensive green couch and refuses to leave. Her children are baffled, and David, in particular, becomes increasingly frantic as hours turn into days of her refusing to budge. He’s doing everything he can to both understand his mother’s insane decision to essentially live inside a furniture store and get her to reconsider while his own family unit cracks and crumbles around him.

The setting for all this turmoil is Oakbed’s Furniture — a shop full of showrooms designed to look like actual living rooms, kitchens, and bedrooms with a labyrinthine layout on par with IKEA’s (as the characters repeatedly mention). Only instead of sleek, Swedish design, Oakbed’s feels like the memory of a house you visited in a dream where the layout is full of impossibilities that you accept without question. It’s only when you wake that you realize everything was wrong.

And that’s a pretty good way to think about Mother, Couch as a whole.

The scenes are always familiar enough — sniping with siblings, trying to placate a parent, negotiating with a shopkeeper — but there’s always something just a little (or a lot, depending on the scene) off. Christopher Bear’s score, which manages to be both whimsical and ominous at once, suits the off-kilter feeling perfectly, using a blend of keyboard and marimba to drum out beats that instinctively get your heart racing, even if all that’s happening is David making a phone call in a parking lot. 

Every moment screams Something is very wrong here!

And that’s because there is: this family isn’t being held together by blood thicker than water. It’s a collection of flimsy paper dolls stuck together with old tape and dried-out tack. Their bonds are breaking, some more subtly than others, with Burstyn’s matriarch at the center, which clearly cannot hold. She doesn’t even get another name in the script; she is simply “Mother,” and it’s a fact the character seems to know and deeply resent.

Burstyn does what she has always done best and approaches this stubborn, callous woman with empathy and understanding. She’s an angry woman who might love her children but also can’t separate them from their fathers and who they were to her: “The three of you are nothing but the result of men demanding my love,” she admits with a grimace.

It’s also a joy to see McGregor far from franchises and playing out a strange version of middle-aged confusion, grief, and fear. The only actor truly short-changed in the film is the wonderful Taylor Russell (Bones and All), who’s stuck playing a hybrid manic pixie dream girl and magical negro whose mere existence does a real disservice to the rest of the script. Russell deserved better, even if she still manages to bring something captivating to the role.

It’s hard to say if this is the fault of casting decisions, the script, or the source material, a Swedish book of the same name that has yet to be translated into English. But the film is hardly perfect, even aside from this blunder.

First-time director Niclas Larsson takes big swings, and it’s refreshing to see someone so unafraid to miss. Even when scenes falter and fail (and a few definitely do), the whole thing is magnetic to watch. Larsson seems to understand exactly how all these disparate pieces fit together, even if he’s not always successful in communicating that understanding. It’s one of those rare films that, even if it’s destined to be a little hated, still feels worth the watch.

Mother, Couch is currently playing in theaters.

Mother, Couch Trailer: