Amanda Kramer's films operate on a frequency that either locks you in or shuts you out in the first ten minutes. Give Me Pity! found its wavelength — a genuinely weird recreation of an imaginary 80s TV special that committed fully to its own unreality. By Design does not find its wavelength. It has a premise that should generate absurdist comedy, erotic unease, or existential dread, and it generates almost none of these things, deliberately. The premise is this: Juliette Lewis plays a depressed single woman whose animating identity or spirit migrates into a chair she once owned. Her body remains — catatonic, flopped on a bed — while the chair becomes, notionally, her. Mamoudou Athie plays a musician whose girlfriend buys him this haunted chair as a guilt offering after leaving him. He becomes obsessed with it. Udo Kier, in a late gamey cameo, plays the chair's designer, who senses something strange about it but cannot name what. The problem is not the premise. The problem is what Kramer refuses to do with it. The merger between Lewis and the chair is never visualized — no effects, no physical transformation, no uncanny doubling. The chair doesn't behave differently. The obsession Athie's character develops has neither comic nor erotic charge, though both are obviously available. Every possible hook for engagement — dark humor, transgressive desire, body-horror, metaphysical comedy — is declined. What remains is the drift. Kramer's Lynchian register is real. The halting dialogue, the trance-state performances, the heavy atmosphere of conceit — these have a visual and tonal coherence. In small doses there are moments where the film's deliberate anesthesia produces something genuinely hypnotic. The trouble is that Lynch's airlessness is always coiled over a mechanism of dread or desire that eventually releases. By Design's airlessness never coils — it just disperses. Lewis, committed as she is, is left with almost nothing to play. Once her character's consciousness departs the body, she has no body to play it in. Athie does considerable work to generate feeling from thin material, and largely fails through no fault of his own. Kier's cameo is the film's only moment of genuine texture — a man who made a strange thing and cannot account for its strangeness — and it's over in minutes. The conclusion, when it arrives, is as inert as everything preceding it. Kramer's project is clearly to make art cinema that uses genre premises as conceptual scaffolding rather than entertainment delivery systems. That's a legitimate ambition. But the scaffolding has to bear some weight. Give Me Pity! bore weight — its TV-special format produced real satirical friction. By Design's chair-as-transferred-consciousness produces only theme: something about identity, the soul, the furniture of a life. Theme without pressure is just wallpaper. Someone somewhere should give Lewis a decent role. That sentence ends the Guardian's review and it's the most accurate thing written about By Design. Lewis has not been given a decent role here — she's been given a concept and asked to disappear into it, which is not the same thing at all.
