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.