By Design review – Juliette Lewis turns into a chair in hypnotic Lynchian drama

Key points

• Amanda Kramer's new film By Design stars Juliette Lewis as a depressed single woman who turns into a chair.
• The film's haunted-chair premise, which a musician becomes obsessed with, is described as potentially hilarious but ultimately unsatisfying.
• The review says the film neglects the comic or erotic potential of its transgressive idea and sleepwalks to an unsatisfying conclusion.

By Design is a new absurdist drama from US film-maker Amanda Kramer, whose previous work includes Give Me Pity! and Please Baby Please. The film stars Juliette Lewis as a depressed single woman who turns into a chair.

The review describes the film as an all but unbearable absurdist drama in which actors deliver halting dialogue as if in a hypnotic trance. It notes that the premise seems set for entertaining visual-effects hijinks, but the result does not deliver.

What happens in the film

According to the review, Lewis's character's body is robbed of its animating identity or spirit, which migrates into the chair while she becomes catatonic, a body flopped down on the bed. The chair itself does not look or behave any differently.

Mamoudou Athie plays a musician whose girlfriend buys him the haunted chair as a guilt offering for walking out on him, and he becomes obsessed with it. The review says the comic or erotic potential of this transgressive idea is entirely neglected.

Someone somewhere should give Lewis a decent role.

— The Guardian Culture

Cameo and conclusion

The chair's designer, played in a cameo by the now late Udo Kier, declares there is something strange about it but cannot decide what it is. The review says the film sleepwalks its way to a conclusion as unsatisfying as everything that has gone before.

The review concludes that someone somewhere should give Lewis a decent role.