By Design Review: You Better Sit Down

Every so often, a film comes along that sounds like someone lost a dare. A woman swaps bodies with a designer chair and discovers people prefer her as furniture. That’s not me being reductive. That’s the actual plot of By Design, the latest from writer-director Amanda Kramer (Please Baby Please), and I’m here to tell you it’s both as strange as you think and more purposeful than you’d expect. It’s also a two-steps-forward, one-step-back kind of experience, where flashes of real insight keep getting interrupted by detours that test your patience.

Camille (Juliette Lewis, Cape Fear) walks into a showroom with two friends after their weekly inconsequential lunch, ready to shop. “We never buy. Oh no, we never buy!” She spots a chair and feels something cosmic pull her toward it, but a seed of financial doubt planted by the saleswoman and her friends makes her hesitate. When she returns the next day, the chair has been sold. Knowing she’s meant to be with it, Camille makes the kind of wish you only see in dark fairy tales, and suddenly her consciousness has traded places with the thing. Her empty body sits slumped at home while her soul, now housed in polished wood with armrests, gets carried off to its new owner.

Lewis earned an Oscar nomination at seventeen and has spent decades bouncing between top-shelf directors and films that never deserved her. Here, she spends most of the runtime not moving or speaking, and her presence alone is a performance.

An early scene opposite Cynthia (Betty Buckley, Carrie), her steely mother, is remarkable. Lewis’s morose, unblinking expression is all Buckley needs to hold a devastating one-sided conversation, and the admissions that spill out land harder than anything spoken in return. This pattern repeats through the film in a semi-Weekend at Bernie’s fashion. Samantha Mathis (This is My Life) and Robin Tunney are vapid delights as Camille’s gossipy friends, propping her up in bed for a girls’ night with charcuterie, wine, and nail polish, bombarding her with questions they cheerfully answer for her.

Meanwhile, Olivier (Mamoudou Athie, Kinds of Kindness) inherits the chair as a parting gift from his ex (Alisa Tores) and almost instantly recognizes something strange pulling him toward it. When he brings it to a dinner party, the guests proceed to covet and define the chair in ways that are so on the nose you can practically hear Kramer winking. It’s a scene I suspect will lose some viewers, edited to die a slow death with comedy that never lands anywhere near the satire it aims for. I’d urge those people to stick around for an appearance by the late, great Udo Kier (Downsizing) as the chair’s original designer, who senses something has changed.

The most brilliant casting decision is Melanie Griffith (Working Girl) as the film’s narrator, a device that shouldn’t work as well as it does. Kramer’s dialogue sounds tailor-made for Griffith’s near-giggle delivery, leaning into broad satire one moment and pulling back to reveal real drama the next. It’s one of Griffith’s best performances and the film’s most inspired achievement.

Technically, By Design is sharper than its premise might suggest. Patrick Meade Jones’s soft cinematography is full of crisp lines and angles, and Sophie Hardeman’s costume design dresses each character as a complete individual. The score from Giulio Carmassi and Bryan Scary stays dramatic but stable as chaos unfolds, and Benjamin Shearn’s editing keeps the soul-swap logic clear without overexplaining it. Even the title sequence is a treat, giving each name space to breathe.

Where By Design falters is in the asides. Kramer adds tangents that bring in extra performers but break the rhythm you’re building. It’s like climbing a mountain and being told every five hundred feet to walk in a circle before continuing. By the time a scene arrives involving dancers on a dark street and a woman who may be possessed by a chair, the wheels have come off.

I’d have loved to see this as part of a triptych, because there isn’t quite enough material for a feature. But the performances that work, particularly Lewis and Griffith, stick with you. By Design is as niche as the furniture in its showroom, but for those willing to sit with something genuinely different, it’s more sturdy than you’d think.