Critic Reviews

The insights and artistic inclinations that populate Kramer’s work aren’t for everyone, and there’s a good chance By Design won’t connect with most viewers. But the alienating nature of the premise is what makes it fascinating, pushing us to question how we want to be seen and experienced as people in the world.

It’s a pointedly strange experience, sometimes annoyingly so and sometimes unexpectedly crushing, but all enjoyably kooky depending on your tolerance for this kind of thing.

The film often feels as impossible to definitively grasp as the coveted furniture that it follows — but whether that’s a feature or a bug lies in the eye of the beholder.

Rather than serve as a shallowly classical body swap story that provides a moral lesson about her growing to appreciate the life she had, the aftermath of this decision is more thematically complicated and engaging. It’s also sincere, tapping into anxieties about being not just liked or even loved, but truly seen.

Amanda Kramer’s “By Design” is an oddball, almost-love story that has more to say about human dejection and desire than a lot of more conventional tales.

At times, By Design is agonizingly opaque or borderline insufferable in its pretentious indulgences; at other times it’s laugh-out-loud funny as it skewers equally pretentious targets.

It has a wacky premise involving a woman swapping places with a chair, but the uncompromising consumerist satire By Design is more performance art than camp classic.

It’s less of a straightforward narrative and more of an experimental one. But it’s not so outlandish that it’s inaccessible.

By forcing us to identify with its largely comatose protagonist, By Design arouses resentment in order to shake us out of torpor.

Kramer has constructed an ironically detached artifact that invites questions about ownership and image and then bats them away, making it a frustrating experience with an intriguing veneer.