Betty Buckley

By Design is ambitious. Its Sundance logline is an intriguing one: “A woman swaps bodies with a chair, and everyone likes her better as a chair.” The double use of “chair” should have been an indicator that this isn’t the biting political satire it could be, but rather a colorful, confusing fever dream that values aesthetics over substance. Its writer and director, Amanda Kramer, certainly has an eye-catching visual style that you can’t ignore. With costumes and sets dripping in 80s art deco revival, she clearly knows what she wants as a director, but she doesn’t quite know what she is trying to say with her eye-popping visuals.