By Design imagines how lovely it would be to simply be a chair

Camille’s social circle demonstrates how easily this can happen even in one’s own friend group. She’s the soft-spoken one among her conniving ladies-who-lunch pals, Lisa (Samantha Mathis) and Irene (Robin Tunney), who cajole and rant at her. Their intentionally stiff performances transport us into a society of itchy discomfort—like if Catherine O’Hara’s avant-garde pronunciations in Schitt’s Creek found a whole impish universe, overseen by Melanie Griffith’s sly voiceover—and the specific world of Camille, who’s allowed life to just happen to her for too long. So, it almost (almost) makes sense when Camille is so struck by a beautiful chair sitting on a showroom floor that, as her lust for it becomes lust to be it, a bit of magic makes her inanimate dreams come true.

In the aftermath, some of By Design‘s best gags involve Camille’s friends and family holding oblivious one-sided conversations with her empty body, which range from completely satirical to strangely moving. (Stage legend Betty Buckley, navigating a monologue that connects the two, has shades of the mom from The Room. As the narrator intones, “a chair makes a very good daughter some days.”) The oddball instigating incident provides lumbar support to the film while dryly funny dialogue, interpretive dancers, and ’80s-inflected kitsch—shot in gauzy crossfades, coated in pastels, seduced by a jazzy score, and suffused with the visual hallmarks of softcore erotica—add decorations to the stagey artificiality. The aesthetic becomes so distractingly designed that, before you know it, buying into the premise is the least of your worries. Sure, she’s a chair now. But why is that guy over there angrily tap dancing?

As the initial shock fades, By Design wraps a feather-boa around its audience and draws them close over the next 90 minutes. As if the subtext of a woman-chair desiring pure usefulness—to have a single purpose, be sat on, and have that purpose so easily met—needed to be more explicit, frequent forays into submissive fetish imagery makes these emotions impossible to ignore. The man doing the sitting (and the sleeping, the dancing, the embracing, and, eventually, the licking) is Olivier, a divorced pianist played by a composed Mamoudou Athie. Athie gives an “Adam Driver in Megalopolis” kind of performance, where he’s devoted to taking this strange world at face value, reasonable compared to the more obvious weirdos, until his own bursts of strangeness emerge.

Olivier and Camille, both talked about and at and rarely to, share a sense of defiance as their intimate seat-sitter relationship progresses. It’s an endearingly straightforward connection that serves as a throughline to be interrupted by some of Kramer’s kooky-artsy characters, like a designer played by Udo Kier, who shows up in one of his final roles wearing some delightfully maximalist jeans. This ensemble is as pointedly arranged as the film’s environment, all of which contributes to By Design‘s unique uncanniness. It’s a decidedly strange experience, sometimes annoyingly and sometimes bracingly so, but like any object worth enjoying, it’s perfect for a certain taste.

Director: Amanda Kramer
Writer: Amanda Kramer
Starring: Juliette Lewis, Mamoudou Athie, Melanie Griffith, Samantha Mathis, Robin Tunney, Udo Kier
Release Date: February 13, 2026