‘By Design’ Review: Juliette Lewis Takes Her Seat In Amanda Kramer’s Militantly Absurd Comedy-Drama

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If you want to know the true meaning of love, find someone that looks at you the way Mamoudou Athie looks at a chair in Amanda Kramer’s surreal, stylish and militantly absurd comedy-drama By Design.

Both specific in its intent and mischievously opaque in its execution, this willfully strange art project can switch from flip to serious in the blink of an eye, using a terrific cast to weave a trance-like state of oddness that somehow sustains to the finishing line.

In Sundance terms, it fills a slot left open by Miranda July, America’s poet laureate of urban dysfunction, presumed missing in action since 2020’s Kajillionaire.

Like July, Kramer is concerned not so much with human beings as the space between them, opening on three women—Camille (Juliette Lewis), Lisa (Samantha Lewis) and Irene (Robin Tunney)—as they meet for their weekly lunch.