Erik Adams
This review is based on a screening at the 2025 Sundance Film Festival.
Amanda Kramer is a visionary. That much is inarguable. The writer-director creates worlds that are both inspired by pre-existing aesthetics – 1950s pulp novels in Please Baby Please, ’80s exercise videos in Give Me Pity! – and entirely her own. They’re theatrical exercises in… well, this part is a little more ambiguous, as Kramer’s films, despite (or perhaps because of) their defiant attitudes and freewheeling energy, are often unfocused. That remains the case with her latest, By Design, a quasi-body-swap movie in which Juliette Lewis wants to buy an expensive chair so badly, she fuses her soul to it. The film gestures towards commentary on conspicuous consumption, its links to the objectification of women, and the ways people tie basic human needs like belonging and identity to their stuff. “I shop, therefore I am” – that kind of thing. But the gestures soon become repetitive, and their point remains elusive.
Lewis’ Camille, as we’re told in an opening voiceover from none other than Melanie Griffith, is a relatively happy and well-adjusted person. She still has that savage emptiness inside of her soul that’s a defining characteristic of modern life, however. Her friends Lisa (Samantha Mathis) and Irene (Robin Tunney) talk at her and around her, and her mom Cynthia (Betty Buckley) expresses love by buying her shoes. As Camille, Lewis spends a good bit of the movie slumped over like a doll. But her eyes are unfocused and far away, even when she’s in control of her limbs.
Kramer doesn’t bother explaining how Camille fuses her consciousness with that of “The Stunner,” a tastefully designed, sensually curved wooden armchair that makes everyone in this movie lose their damn minds. Would it make the concept any more believable if she did? Instead, Kramer films outwards from The Stunner’s seat, the lens smeared with Vaseline to indicate Camille’s fuzzy, disoriented, disembodied POV. But oh, what bliss to be a chair! To shed this messy human body and become something hard and smooth and perfect and desired by all who see it!
It’s even more blissful to be sat upon, particularly by a handsome gentleman like Olivier (Mamoudou Athie), a pianist whose ex gives him the chair because she feels guilty about taking the rest of the furniture in their breakup. Olivier is desired; women want him, and men want to impress him. He moves in rarified art-world circles, whose empty pretension and severe haircuts By Design mercilessly spoofs through a series of minor characters. Any statement in these scenes beyond simply (figuratively) turning to the camera and yelling “ART WORLD” remains ambiguous, however.
Perhaps that’s because By Design is self-consciously artistic as well. Some of the stranger and more interesting scenes in the film are accomplished through the use of modern dancers, who roll around and pile on top of each other to form shapes with their bodies not unlike the sexy arc of the chair. (Uh oh, it’s spreading.) The only time the film’s musings about desire and envy really become erotic is when Lewis and Athie engage in a choreographed dance of seduction, with Lewis stiffening her limbs into chair-like shapes and Athie bending his around her.
This is indeed very weird. But it’s also done in complete seriousness, with a subdued energy that effectively tamps down any ironic smirking. By Design demands to be taken seriously as art, as is its right – it certainly makes it more intriguing than some tired “so bad it’s good” version of this premise. This gravity also opens it up to rigorous interpretation, however, which is where Kramer’s anarchic tendencies can become liabilities.
One area where By Design is extremely disciplined is in its production design, unified around a rarefied version of the Southwestern aesthetic popular in suburban living rooms in the ‘80s and ‘90s. We’re talking carpeted bathrooms. Dusty pink and denim blue. Puffy white chairs. Clay lamps in whitewashed fireplaces. It’s so out of fashion that it circles back to avant garde. And Kramer makes it her own, as she always does.
The performances are less unified: Lewis leans into becoming an object – this is one case where “Go girl! Give us nothing!” is actually a good thing – while Athie, who’s shown an affinity for mind-bending roles with projects like Black Box and Kinds of Kindness, plays the most recognizably human character in the movie. Udo Kier shows up, doing his campy Udo Kier thing, and the rest of the supporting cast dials into his wavelength.
The dissonance between the performances and the scattered breadcrumbs of commentary combine awkwardly with the film’s own ambitions towards fine art, creating an experience that’s confounding in a different way. It’s not as fun as its bizarre premise might suggest, in other words, which is a testament to Kramer’s uncompromising artistic integrity. There’s a lot of modern dance to get there, though.
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