{"id":646977,"date":"2026-10-15T08:16:17","date_gmt":"2026-10-15T08:16:17","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/646977\/"},"modified":"2026-10-15T08:16:17","modified_gmt":"2026-10-15T08:16:17","slug":"by-design-review-juliette-lewis-turns-into-a-chair-in-hypnotic-lynchian-drama-movies","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/646977\/","title":{"rendered":"By Design review \u2013 Juliette Lewis turns into a chair in hypnotic Lynchian drama | Movies"},"content":{"rendered":"

The indie indulgences of US film-maker Amanda Kramer \u2013 which often contain big names making small appearances \u2013 are such a puzzle; sometimes they work, sometimes they don\u2019t. I enjoyed her weird reverie about an imaginary 80s TV special, called Give Me Pity!<\/a>, but not so much the 1950s-camp daydream Please Baby Please<\/a>, 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\u2019s films to float away from the audience.<\/p>\n

By Design is an all but unbearable absurdist drama. The actors deliver halting dialogue as if in a hypnotic trance, paralysed by the film\u2019s heavy conceit: Juliette Lewis<\/a> 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 \u2013 not really. What in fact happens is that Lewis\u2019s 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\u2019t look or behave in any way differently.<\/p>\n

Mamoudou Athie, doing his considerable best, plays a musician whose girlfriend buys him this haunted chair as a kind of guilt offering for walking out on him, and he becomes obsessed with it \u2013 although the comic or erotic potential of this transgressive idea is entirely neglected. The chair\u2019s designer (a gamey cameo for the now late Udo Kier<\/a>) declares there is something strange about it but he can\u2019t decide what it is. And so the film sleepwalks its way to a conclusion as unsatisfying as everything that has gone before. Someone somewhere should give Lewis a decent role.<\/p>\n

By Design is in UK cinemas from 16 October<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"The indie indulgences of US film-maker Amanda Kramer \u2013 which often contain big names making small appearances \u2013…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":646978,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[27],"tags":[146,85,46,397],"class_list":["post-646977","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-movies","tag-entertainment","tag-il","tag-israel","tag-movies"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/646977","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=646977"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/646977\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/646978"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=646977"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=646977"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=646977"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}