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

A musician becomes obsessed with the haunted seat, but the potentially hilarious premise sleepwalks its way to an unsatisfying conclusion

The indie indulgences of US film-maker Amanda Kramer – which often contain big names making small appearances – are such a puzzle; sometimes they work, sometimes they don’t. I enjoyed her weird reverie about an imaginary 80s TV special, called Give Me Pity!, but not so much the 1950s-camp daydream Please Baby Please, with Andrea Riseborough. Now she gives us a film with a toweringly strange and potentially hilarious premise, on which the result does not in any way deliver. Yet there are moments of interest in the dreamy Lynchian drift that causes Kramer’s films to float away from the audience.

By Design is an all but unbearable absurdist drama. The actors deliver halting dialogue as if in a hypnotic trance, paralysed by the film’s heavy conceit: Juliette Lewis plays a depressed single woman who turns into a chair. The scene seems set for some entertaining hijinks with visual effects, in which Lewis and the chair merge. But no – not really. What in fact happens is that Lewis’s own body is supposedly 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 doesn’t look or behave in any way differently.

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