By Design review: Juliette Lewis becomes a chair, to little effect

Juliette Lewis plays a depressed single woman who turns into a chair. That is the premise of Amanda Kramer's By Design, and, according to the Guardian's review, the film does not deliver on it in any way.

Kramer's record divides opinion even among her champions. The Guardian's critic enjoyed her "weird reverie about an imaginary 80s TV special," Give Me Pity! (2023), but not the 1950s-camp daydream Please Baby Please (2023), which starred Andrea Riseborough. Her indie films often feature big names making small appearances. Sometimes they work. Sometimes they don't.

By Design lands in the second column. The review calls it "an all but unbearable absurdist drama" in which actors deliver halting dialogue "as if in a hypnotic trance," paralysed by the film's heavy conceit.

What actually happens to Juliette Lewis's character?

The premise seems to promise visual-effects comedy — Lewis and the chair merging on screen. The review is blunt: "But no – not really." Instead, Lewis's body is supposedly robbed of its animating identity, which migrates into the chair while she becomes catatonic, a body flopped on a bed. The chair itself, the review notes, does not look or behave differently from any other chair.

That refusal to dramatise its own transformation is the film's core problem. A premise that invites hijinks produces a sleepwalk. The Guardian describes the outcome as "a potentially hilarious premise" that "sleepwalks its way to an unsatisfying conclusion."

Is there anything to recommend?

Not nothing. The review finds "moments of interest in the dreamy Lynchian drift" that causes Kramer's films to float away from the audience. The comparison to David Lynch is the film's real texture: hypnotic pacing, trance-like performances, a narrative logic that runs on dream association rather than plot mechanics.

What does this change for Kramer's standing? On this evidence, her pattern holds: bold concepts, uneven execution. Give Me Pity! proved she can sustain a conceit; By Design proves the conceit alone is not the film. Viewers who want the premise fulfilled — a woman visibly becoming furniture — will leave unsatisfied. Viewers willing to sit inside a trance for its own sake may find those drifting passages worth the wait.

The unanswered question is the obvious one: what drew Lewis, a performer with mainstream muscle, into a role that spends most of the runtime as a catatonic body beside an ordinary chair? The review does not say. Neither, apparently, does the film.