Anomaly Film Festival 2025 Coverage
By Design review
When is a chair not a chair?
Festival reviews will not contain spoilers.
By Design
Directed by Amanda Kramer
Written by Amanda Kramer
Starring Juliette Lewis, Mamoudou Athie, Samantha Mathis, Robin Tunney, Alisa Torres, Clifton Collins Jr. and Keir Gilchrist
By Design Review
Day four of this year’s Anomaly Film Festival featured four feature films (accompanied by a short film) and a full block of shorts. A long day by any measurement. It’s good then that the festival filled it with some of the strangest things it had in its arsenal. We’ll get to, perhaps, the festival’s weirdest feature (Anything That Moves) in a future review. The strangest short film I saw at this year’s festival accompanied By Design in the early feature window on a Saturday afternoon.
Reddening is an odd one. Performance art meets experimental films. Visual style, booming audio, costumes…it’s all weird. Interesting for sure…but somewhat impenetrable. Not because you can’t decipher the story. It’s about four beings awakening or being born or whatever. Stylish work…where people drool water into each other’s mouths. They make sure to hit all four just in case it wasn’t your thing the first three times. The kind of work that meant something to the person who made it…so it may to you as well. I was left feeling like it was achieving what it wanted to…but you could see the effort behind it in every frame. Unnatural isn’t a bad feeling for this type of experimental storytelling, I guess.
The first feature of the day was By Design. A dark comedy written and directed by Amanda Kramer. It stars Juliette Lewis as a chair. Well…that’s getting ahead of things. It stars Juliette Lewis as Camille, a woman who wants to buy a chair. Samantha Mathis and Robin Tunney star as her friends Lisa and Irene, respectively. Mamoudou Athie plays Olivier…the man who ends up owning the chair that Camille…becomes. Alright, I need to try to explain this plot before the intro becomes too convoluted.
Camille is out shopping with her friends Lisa and Irene when she sees a chair in a…chair store. She doesn’t just like the chair…she admires it. It’s function, it’s beauty…the way other people look at it. Unfortunately, the chair is purchased by someone else before she can scrape together the money to buy it for herself. A strange backup option arrives when Camille’s conscience is transferred to the chair…rendering her an inanimate object. Two inanimate objects, in fact…her lifeless body is still in the picture.
What follows is a pretty good dark comedy. Camille feels more love and purpose as a chair than she ever did in life. Meanwhile, her friends and her own mother seem largely oblivious to any differences with her demeanor now that they are interacting with a lifeless body. Emphasis on the dark part of dark comedy. Camille has never been happier than she is being fawned over and admired by Olivier and anyone he shows the chair off to. It’s at this point where I should mention…it’s just a chair. A wooden chair that is clearly expensive in the world of By Design…but a chair, nonetheless. We view it as a chair with the consciousness of a human…but the world is just seeing a chair. And that’s better than being an aging woman who gets less attention than a wooden chair.
By Design has some clear pointedness to its commentary but it’s also quite funny. Scenes where the lifeless Camille spends time with her friends are the highlight of the movie. Lisa and Irene slowly begin to think something might be wrong with their friend (who hasn’t spoken or moved in days). It’s a gradual realization at best. Her own mother takes the opportunity to lay out a strong helping of unwanted advice while remaining oblivious to the fact that her daughter isn’t even there.
The there’s the chair. I’ll admit I don’t get it. People fawn over the chair as if it is a work of art. Right down to the creative mind behind it being treated like a famous artist. I just see a chair. Now…narratively that makes perfect sense. The point is to show the absurdity of the situation. To make the fact that a person could feel less loved than a common household object sting. And it does. But the heightened affection people have for this particular chair never quite landed for me. It’s a bit of a logic problem, really. For the story to work…people have to think the chair is remarkable…and the chair can’t be remarkable. By Design never quite meshed the two concepts together for me. I don’t understand why people like this chair. There’s a picture of it in the poster above. Maybe you’ll love the chair too.
By Design also has to walk a bit of a fine line with trying to figure that out. The love of the chair can’t, in any way, be due to Camille’s spirit being trapped inside of it or it undermines the entire point. So, it’s just a chair. That people love for some reason. Because the story needs them to. You see the issue. It’s not a deal breaker…and By Design gets some laughs and a fairly devastating finale out of the concept. It just feels like there’s a missing dot that was never connected.
Scare Value
By Design offers a bleak but entertaining commentary. It’s funny, sad and, most importantly, unique. A woman body swapping with a chair isn’t a plot I’ve seen before. Writer/director Amanda Kramer wrings a surprising amount of depth out of the scenario. Comparing how a simple chair is fawned over to how an aging woman is viewed turns out to be a clever concept. If you don’t mind being a little depressed about the conclusions it reaches…there are some darkly comedic moments along the way.
