Rating: NR | Runtime: 92 minutes
Release Date: February 13th, 2026
Studio: Music Box Films
Director(s): Amanda Kramer
Writer(s): Amanda Kramer

Oh. To be someone’s favorite thing.

The main reason I bought a ticket to Amanda Kramer’s By Design was how much the synopsis made me think of Joseph Kosuth’s One and Three Chairs (although the amazing cast definitely helped). I’ve been fascinated by the piece since college and its ability to deconstruct conception itself. Because what is a chair? The object we use? An image of the object? Its definition? We’re talking utility versus identity. Practicality versus aesthetic. Abstract versus real. So, this idea of a woman (Juliette Lewis’ Camille) becoming a chair and falling in love with its owner (Mamoudou Athie’s Olivier) as he falls in love with it really spoke to the subjectivity of experience, purpose, and desire.

Kramer explained the genesis of the project during her post-premiere Q&A screening as the frustration of watching a group of women fawn over an image of Nicole Kidman. It wasn’t the act itself, but the focus. Why do we adore the person when what we’re really drawn to is their appearance? Why envy Kidman and not the dress? Or the make-up? Why envy this woman—beyond the economic and physical ability to afford and fit the clothing, etc.—when any woman could feasibly put herself in Kidman’s place? Is it so weird to covet a thing rather than a person? Is it worth being jealous about a person when it’s their possessions they truly wish to obtain?

More than simply expanding one’s scope to personify an inanimate object or embrace the absurdity that comes from earnestly letting it happen, however, Kramer’s film is also about the opposite insofar as our societal and cultural trend of objectifying women. So, when Camille’s soul embeds itself into Olivier’s chair, her body doesn’t disappear. As such, just as the chair becomes a “person,” Camille becomes a “thing.” The messed up result isn’t that the former is held as something precious, but that the latter suddenly is too. She lived her whole life faded in the background: agreeably joining, constantly ignored, and always patronized. Now that she’s a limp mass of flesh? She’s finally seen.

Except, of course, that’s not entirely true. Her friends (Samantha Mathis and Robin Tunney) and mother (Betty Buckley) don’t “see” her. They’re merely able to use her without the threat of being denied. She becomes a doll to pose. A mirror to judge oneself in the silence devoid of approval. Whereas these women pettily peck and poke each other with gossip and resentment, Camille’s stillness forces them to peck and poke themselves. And when a predator arrives (Clifton Collins Jr.) to harm her, that same docility forces him to realize where his anger comes from and how this won’t help quell it. All these characters project what they need Camille to be to satisfy what’s wrong with them. Her unwitting refusal exposes their hypocrisy.

It therefore makes sense that Camille is happy as a chair. Rather than be looked through (as the world did when she was human and does now that she’s a body), she’s finally being looked at. Olivier, a man who struggles to maintain human relationships (much like Camille), loves her essence and form. He craves sitting on her. She craves being crushed. She’s become someone everyone wants and he finally owns something everyone wants. It’s very much a treatise on self-esteem and identity in this way. Our indoctrination to be and do according to the status quo often limiting our full potential. And the sad reality that, even after achieving our uniquely individualized fantasies, shame has a way of returning us to our self-imposed prisons.

By Design has a lot to say and does so in a dryly comic way that both appeals to audiences with its satirical metaphors and alienates them via its performance art affectations, interpretative dance, and glacial pacing. It’s a work that exists out of time and reality with off-putting line-deliveries, embellished performances, and idiosyncratic costuming and production design. An art film through and through despite there being so many familiar faces, Kramer has created an intentional counter to today’s television and movies being what Lewis describes as “Plot, plot, plot.” It’s not mainstream and, admittedly, had my eye-lids drooping, but you cannot deny the message or ingenuity of its admirable big swing.

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Samantha Mathis, Juliette Lewis and Robin Tunney appear in BY DESIGN by Amanda Kramer, an official selection of the 2025 Sundance Film Festival. Courtesy of Sundance Institute | photo by Patrick Meade Jones.