Juliette Lewis Is Magically Confounding By Design, Her Soul Trapped in a Chair

One of Sundance’s more buzzy, if baffling debuts this year has oddity oozing from both its pores and its varnished exterior. It’s clear from the moment one hears the premise of In Design that you’re in for something memorably surreal. It’s not every day you see a film that can be summed up as “A woman trades body and soul with a chair.”

The fifth narrative feature of director Amanda Kramer (Please Baby Please) premiered at the festival last month and seems to care little for whether its prototypical audience member can wrap their head around its absurdities. It is content to tell its metaphorically layered story about lonely, dissatisfied humans, the way we perceive each other and internalize aspects of gender and sex, and the way genuine empathy and interest in others tends to remain just outside of our list of priorities. At times, By Design is agonizingly opaque or borderline insufferable in its pretentious indulgences; at other times it’s laugh-out-loud funny as it skewers equally pretentious targets. It casts a brooding, psychosexual spell over its audience, even as its characters drop vocabulary words like “jejune” into their casual conversations with one another.

And it all begins with a really, really attractively designed chair, as stumbled over by Camille (Juliette Lewis) and her lunch pals, Lisa (Samantha Mathis) and Irene (Robin Tunney) as they browse an antique store. Camille, a wounded woman drifting through life and lacking a particularly strong identity, is taken by it instantaneously as some empty part of her rapidly begins to fill up. She envies, as the omniscient narrator (Melanie Griffith) notes, “its beauty, its usefulness, its deserving of praise.” Seeing something so perfectly suited for its purpose rocks her to her core as she compares the relative merit of the chair to that of her own life. “Who needs or appreciates Camielle as much as they do a chair?”, asks the narrator. “She’s never been able to sit there silently and still be seen.” Even her friends are quickly drawn in by its strange, elemental power. The chair awakens things in almost anyone who stops to drink it in.

The subsequent body swap is simultaneously more literal and more symbolic than you’re probably imagining. It is absolutely accurate that Camille swaps consciousnesses with said chair. She inhabits its rigid, strong wooden frame, becoming a passenger within it who thrills at the appreciative way the world now looks at her as a useful, aesthetically pleasing item. Her former physical body, meanwhile, slumps over in disuse, occupied by the consciousness of, well … a chair.

Surreality forces its way increasingly into the vague outline of a story by the way people react–or don’t react–to these developments. The people in Camille’s life barely note her seeming catatonia at all, becoming clear commentary on the disinterest we show to the silent suffering of friends and family. Camille’s friends–and at one point, her nitpicking mother–visit her prone, limp form at her apartment and simply prattle on about themselves or critique her life while her body lays there, unblinking. Some take turns for the confessional, taking advantage of her new status as a seemingly excellent listener. All of them project their own feelings onto her now empty husk of a body, using her to unburden themselves. “Camille’s body has really moved Camille’s mother,” says the narrator. “A chair makes a very good daughter some days.”

The vessel that is the magnificent chair, meanwhile, is purchased by an enigmatic woman named Marta (Alisa Torres) as a sort of breakup consolation prize for her former beau Olivier (Mamoudou Athie), from whom we’re repeatedly told she has taken just about everything else. Not that Olivier minds the loss of all his stuff–not when the sumptuous chair graces his otherwise empty apartment. Like so many others, he’s entranced by it, though his connection runs even deeper. Is it really the chair that has him so enchanted, or the soul of Camille that inhabits it?

This all honestly makes By Design sound more conventional than it actually is, like some kind of quirky fantasy romance about unlikely lovers finding each other via fate. The truth is that Kramer’s film is considerably more surreal, its characters’ souls conveyed less by tools like dialogue and instead evoked via body language and a number of interpretive dance dream sequences, simmering in sexual repression and emasculation. Athie is effectively the film’s true central focus despite the narrator popping up throughout to opine on the feelings of the inert Camille–although Juliette Lewis is asked to effectively emote and act while her inert body is being absconded with in one of the film’s strangest sequences, it’s Athie whose sorrow, fragility and eventually dependence upon the chair resonate most strongly. His tender performance is what keeps By Design watchable during its most meandering moments.

Kramer’s odd and unclassifiable story is filled with moments of absurdity equally likely to result in delight and consternation–a tap-dancing body thief, a dinner party that devolves into chaos as everyone demands to rejoice in the ecstatic pleasure of sitting in a particular chair–but it remains perplexingly engrossing throughout, building to a conclusion with at least some degree of catharsis. A charming, deeply strange meditation on self worth, By Design makes clear its intent to provoke analysis, which viewers with a sufficient attention span should be happy to provide.

Director: Amanda Kramer
Writer: Amanda Kramer
Stars: Juliette Lewis, Mamoudou Athie, Melanie Griffith, Samantha Mathis, Robin Tunney
Release date: Jan. 23, 2025 (Sundance Film Festival)

Jim Vorel is Paste’s Movies editor and resident genre geek. You can follow him on Twitter or on Bluesky for more film writing.