Disclaimer: I’m a blind film critic and I typically review films with audio description. By design, this film doesn’t have one.

I’d argue that By Design is a movie for no one. It unabashedly discards convention in favor of driving a high concept narrative that is destined to just outright turn people off. The elevator pitch here is essentially that Juliette Lewis is a chair. And Yes, that premise got me to watch this film. I don’t regret it. it has no audio description, it is one of the weirdest things I’ve ever seen, and is borderline incomprehensible from a blind standpoint. But the one thing it isn’t is boring. it isn’t derivative. It isn’t the 87th Tyler Perry movie to release in a calendar year, or the inexplicable third Strangers film in a trilogy no one asked for. No one put Ice Cube in a room during the pandemic expecting him to act, and it has no connection to a single superhero from any cinematic universe. Juliette Lewis is a chair, and this is what we deserve.

Sometimes, we need to course correct by pulling in a different direction radically first, and later we find the better path. Films like By Design fall into that arts for arts sake, the typical film festival darling that only the most pretentious seem to truly “get”. It is like Robert Zemeckis’s failed attempt at structure in Here, showing us the same spot over the passage of time. Here, because Lewis becomes a chair, she has a forced perspective. The film could have just been a lot of ass, as people sit in her. I don’t know. But, Lewis, with the assistance of Melanie Griffith and some other recognizable faces, go for a tale about a woman wanting to be fawned over and adored as much as a piece of furniture so she transfers her conciousness into the chair.

It is getting a thumbs up from me, because I was oddly entranced by the audacity of the film. It must be the weirdest thing I will see this year, and while that doesn’t always equate to interesting, there’s something here that was. So, I’m tossing this a small bone, while also acknowledging blind people will be driven insane by the lack of audio description, especially at the end when some horrifying shit seems to be occurring. It also is so on the fringe of society, so avant-garde that it is a film for no one, except the rare few. It’s a film seemingly cool to either pretend you loved, or laugh at for its absurdity. but again, it is never boring, and it is original to a fault.

One of the weirdest films I’ve ever had the privilege to sit through, and I don’t regret it for a second. Films like this with all the audacity in the world to dispose of conventions are still necessary in our cinematic landscape as palate cleansers for all the reboots and derivative slop coming.

Fresh: Final Grade: 6.3/10