‘By Design’ Review: Juliette Lewis Turns Into a Chair in a Comedy That Won’t Sit Well With Many [C-] – Sundance Film Festival

Every single screening of By Design at the 2025 Sundance Film Festival is sold out. The logline – “A woman swaps bodies with a chair, and everyone likes her better as a chair” – is just so bizarre that everyone wants to see how it could work as a movie. What I want to know is how many of those theater seats empty out by the time the film is finished. It feels like the exact sort of film that will inspire mass walkouts – and that its “film radical” director Amanda Kramer (Ladyworld, Paris Window) wouldn’t have it any other way. By Design radiates at least much trollish glee in pushing an audience to their limits of weirdness as past Sundance walk-out films like Swiss Army Man and Sasquatch Sunset. I mostly loved the Daniels’ farting corpse movie and found enough to appreciate in the Zellners’ bigfoot movie – sadly, I cannot say the same for this chair movie.

What makes By Design difficult to review is that just about everything about it that’s unlikable seems like it’s completely intentional. I try to judge films on their own terms, but what does that mean when the terms are annoying? The title might as well be a rejoinder to the haters. The dialogue is unrealistic and the performances awkward and overblown? That’s by design. The story stretches a silly one-note premise far past the point of making any sense or even staying funny? Also by design. The main character has no real arc and her circumstances are just one cruel cosmic joke? You get the picture.

The filmmaking provides some mild entertainment in bits and pieces. Right from the catalogue layout of the opening credit titles, the visual style has an appealing sense of precision. Major props (pun intended) to production designer Grace Surnow and art director Anjélica Vasquez for finding just the right chair to center the film around – ordinary enough to heighten the joke of the characters’ obsession over it, yet elegant enough that the obsession also makes some degree of sense. Benjamin Shearn’s editing creates some fun visual gags: match-cuts flipping back and forth between the human Camille (Juliette Lewis) and the chair she trades places with, a frame-within-a-frame centered on the lips on the other end of a phone call, overlays and dissolves in the surreal dance sequences.

Initially, there’s also fun to be had in the novelty of watching good actors like Lewis go whole-hog in embracing the hallmarks of “bad” acting: confusing emphases, unnatural pauses, inconsistent volume control, overdone expressions. Alas, this 90 minute exercise in intentional camp wears out its welcome and turns into an exercise in tedium. There’s a reason most “bad on purpose” Adult Swim comedies only have 11-minute episodes – it’s hard to keep that style engaging for the length of a full feature. This would likely be more accessible as a short, though widespread appeal doesn’t seem to be something Kramer is interested in.

The point, in as much as I can claim to “get” the point, seems to be a play on the idea of objectification taken to its literal extreme. The chair-with-Camille’s-soul is filmed in eroticized visual language, even having a “sex scene” of sorts with her new owner Olivier (Mamoudou Athie) licking her wood. Camille wants to be the object of desire (it’s telling that the tune of Gershwin’s “Someone to Watch Over Me” bookends the film’s soundtrack), so she’s happy being the object everyone including herself desires. The Camille-with-the-chair’s-soul, on the other hand, becomes an object of reflection for those around her – because she doesn’t say or do anything, people can project whatever they want onto her blank slate. Her mom (Betty Buckley) likes that she’s become a “good listener,” and her friends Lisa (Samantha Mathis) and Irene (Robin Tunney) now have empathy for her “sadness.” In the most “WTF” sequence, a tap-dancing stalker-rapist (Clifton Collins Jr.) tries to have his way with Camille-with-the-chair’s-soul, but undergoes an existential crisis when she shows no sign of pain or resistance and delivers a therapeutic 3-minute monologue about his relationship anxieties.

The ultimate resolution to how Camille gets back in her own body is cheesy and anticlimactic… by design. The ending gets a bit more energy out of Lewis’s full histrionics returning after being restrained to playing a chair for the middle of the movie, but the big punchline of Camille’s non-arc just feels mean… again, by design. And if repeating “by design” so many times is annoying to read in this review, the final pun from the film’s narrator (Melanie Griffith) is just as eye-rolling.

There’s another recent movie involving a character turning into a chair – Makoto Shinkai’s anime Suzume. It used its weird set-up in ways that were funny, thrilling, and life-affirming. By Design certainly isn’t trying to be exciting or inspiring, while how much it succeeds at being funny is subjective. I found it too annoying and not quite clever enough to find much pleasure in its 90 minutes of off-putting artifice and nihilism, but I have some respect for its careful construction, and perhaps there will be some who vibe better with its unique sensibility. Everyone else is better off watching Suzume.

Grade: C-

This review is from the 2025 Sundance Film Festival. By Design is currently seeking U.S. distribution.