A woman gazes at two other women as the caress a chair illuminated in a spotlight.

By Design Needs To Go Back to the Drawing Board

Film Reviews

By Design
Director: Amanda Kramer
Cold Iron Pictures and Smudge Films
Premiere: 1.23

The first time that I attended a film festival in my teens, I remember overhearing someone going over the main categories: narrative, documentary and experimental. When the person was asked to explain an “experimental” film, they said simply, “It’s a narrative or a documentary that didn’t turn out.” While this amusing oversimplification sells some very good films short, an inherent part of experimenting is jumping into something fully committed, whether it works or not. By Design is a movie that’s lacking in many areas, but commitment isn’t one of them.

Camille (Juliette Lewis, Natural Born Killers, Cape Fear) feels invisible in her daily life, overshadowed by her talkative friends Lisa (Samantha Mathis, Broken Arrow) and Irene (Robin Tunney, Empire Records, The Craft) and an overbearing mother, Cynthia (Broadway icon Betty Buckley). Longing for purpose, she becomes obsessed with a designer chair she can’t afford. When she touches it, her soul mysteriously transfers into the furniture, leaving her physical body alive but lifeless. The chair is purchased by Olivier (Mamoudou Athie, Jurassic World: Dominion, Kinds of Kindness), a lonely pianist who finds unexpected comfort in its presence. Meanwhile, Camille’s friends struggle with her unresponsive body, failing to acknowledge her absence.

I’m not a big fan of the deus ex machina of third party voice-over narration, and its presence usually means either you’re watching a parody or the film ended up so incoherent that there was no other option but to to add one. While there is, at times, a definite feeling that By Design is poking fun at overly pretentious arthouse fare, in the end, the narration by Melanie Griffith (Working Girl) is there because without it, we wouldn’t have the faintest idea what in the hell we’re watching. This surrealist satire is meant to be a social commentary on materialism, self-esteem and how we define ourselves by the things we own, and it makes those points rather clear (with a voice-over narration, how can it not?), but it could have done so in much less time. This is clearly a concept for a short film, not a feature — and because of this, the film becomes a series of increasingly disconnected vignettes. 

The best moments of the film involve Olivier’s obsession with the chair, going so far as to take it to a dinner party because he’s unwilling to sit on anything else. The sequences cutting back to Camille’s inert body are torturous to sit through, the worst being an extended sequence involving a man (Clifton Collins Jr., Jockey) breaking into her house, dragging her out on her balcony, monologuing incessantly about where his anger comes from and ultimately deciding not to hurt her. It’s a squirm-in-your-seat sequence that doesn’t quite work as drama, really doesn’t work as comedy and goes on for entirely too long.

Lewis is great in everything leading up to her becoming a chair, though I found the performance of the chair itself to be a bit wooden. Athie has a presence that I’d really like see in more leading roles, but I grew tired of his character rather quickly, and Griffith effectively made me think, “I know that voice,” and pull out my phone to look it up — which made me very glad I was watching it at home instead of at an in-person screening. The ensemble is strong and better than the material itself. The entire film plays strikingly like a play that Joey would appear in on Friends, and the fact that we never get to see the moment where Chandler tells him what he thought of it is tragic on multiple levels. And wasting an actor of Collins’ character on such a wrong tasteless and lethargic sequence is particularly off-putting. 

In the end, By Design is a moderately interesting failure, and only the presence of recognizable actors gives any hint that it’s a movie one would expect to see at a festival the size of Sundance. It’s the kind of official selection that gets chosen because it has a short enough runtime to easily fit into programming and some stars to promote, but it’s a stretch to call it a film. —Patrick Gibbs 

Read more of SLUG’s coverage of the 2025 Sundance Film Festival.