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Sundance movie review: 'By Design' makes chair body swap wonderfully bizarre

From left, Samantha Mathis, Juliette Lewis and Robin Tunney admire a chair in "By Design," which premiered at the 2025 Sundance Film Festival. Photo courtesy of Sundance Institute
1 of 5 | From left, Samantha Mathis, Juliette Lewis and Robin Tunney admire a chair in "By Design," which premiered at the 2025 Sundance Film Festival. Photo courtesy of Sundance Institute

PARK CITY, UTAH Jan. 24 (UPI) -- In Hollywood, a high concept movie usually refers to a blockbuster with a simple, compelling hook like "bomb on a bus" in Speed or "asteroid heading to Earth" in Armageddon.

By Design, which premiered Thursday at the Sundance film festival, is a high concept arthouse comedy.

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Camille (Juliette Lewis) sees a chair in a furniture store, but when she comes back to buy it it's already sold. Her wish to become the chair comes true and she switches bodies with it.

"Body swap with a chair" is certainly a simple enough premise that demands one watch the movie to find out how they pull it off. It's not the kind of '80s romp like Vice Versa or 18 Again, but rather a surreal absurdist comedy.

Marta (Alisa Torres) bought the chair to give to musician Olivier (Mamoudou Athie). Olivier falls in love with the chair himself, going so far as to bring it to dinner parties so he can keep sitting in it.

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Olivier gets so possessive about the chair it's bizarre and hilarious. Other guests want to try the chair and he firmly resists, leading to an awkward fight.

Meanwhile, Camille's body lies inert because she's been taken over by a chair. This leads to comical situations as well.

Her mother (Betty Buckley) and friends Alyssa (Robin Tunney) and Lisa (Samantha Mathis) read into Camille's silence and react on their own assumptions. Camille also gets credit for things that happen around her, with people assuming she was proactive.

The film even explores what dark things could happen to a motionless body. This becomes comical too, as her lack of resistance confuses the attacker (Clifton Collins Jr).

The characters speak in a way that is so abrupt and deadpan it is funny. When shopping for the chair, Lisa calls it "a hopeful chair" when Camille suggests buying it for potential guests.

Camille gets intense when she's trying to convince the saleswoman that she's a serious buyer. Melanie Griffith narrates the tale, applying a sense of whimsy to the proceedings.

Just the intensity of passion characters show for a chair is absurd. Production designer Grace Surnow made a pretty chair, but come on!

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There are a few fantasy sequences that break the reality of the film, if you can even call it that. But dance sequences with the chair and Athie sitting on Lewis add more surreal interludes.

All of this unfolds in a world of simple, recognizable aesthetics, so much so that they too are a tad unreal. Both Camille and Olivier live in stark, empty rooms and the fact that Camille still wears knee-high stockings and high heels at home suggests it's a performance rather than a lived-in world.

Camille has a phone call with Lisa during which a closeup of Lisa's lips appears, rather than cutting back and forth. Other scenes employ creatively stylized visuals too, including the chair's point of view.

Writer/director Amanda Kramer answers her question: what if a woman switched places with a chair? Kramer did indeed have a whole movie's worth of exploration of that premise.

Fred Topel, who attended film school at Ithaca College, is a UPI entertainment writer based in Los Angeles. He has been a professional film critic since 1999, a Rotten Tomatoes critic since 2001, and a member of the Television Critics Association since 2012 and the Critics Choice Association since 2023. Read more of his work in Entertainment.

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