By Design: The Theatre Of The Absurd On Screen

By Heesun Park

Courtesy of Sundance Institute

The story of writer-director Amanda Kramer’s By Design (2025) is an absurd one. And I’m not saying the term derogatorily. The film is, by theatre definition, genuinely absurd.

Camille is a middle-aged woman who feels different from the people around her. She wants ideas and meaning to fill her life. She wants deep connection. She wants genuine communication. She wants to feel seen. She wishes and she wants. She wants. She wants. She wants. 

She wants a chair. 

She obsesses over it. 

But she cannot have it.

And so she becomes the chair instead—storing her consciousness inside the piece of furniture and leaving her physical body behind.

Her body’s still there. It still exists. But now it’s empty.

And people seem to like her more like this. In Camille’s hollowness and catatonia—her literal objectification—she becomes a mirror and a vacuum for those around her to use.

Somewhere down the line the film strangely becomes a love story. 

The chair falls into the ownership of Olivier, a young and handsome pianist, who wanders a pretentious art world. His body and soul may still be one, but he has already become an object in the eyes of his patrons and peers. He, too, wants deep connection and meaning to fill his life. And somehow, now in possession of her chair vessel, he sees Camille for who she truly is. 

Or, at least, that’s what she thinks.

My feelings for By Design waver between pure admiration for its stylishness and unapologetic theatricality and something akin to Roger Ebert’s review of David Lynch’s Lost Highway (1997) (albeit way, way, way less contemptous). Kramer, no doubt, is an expert in theatre and the art of directing. It is apparent that every line and tableau is chocked full of intent and meaning. Exaggerated by beautiful stills, sets seemingly taken directly from the stage, and a type of visceral, slow-burn performance I can only compare to the 2016 production of María Irene Fornés’s Drowning at the Signature Center, By Design boldly leans into the feeling of a performance. And it’s a fitting choice, considering how hard it hits the idea of womanhood in itself being a performance.

But, combined with the usage of abstract externalizations of Camille and Olivier’s emotions through the way of modern dance and just the general surreality of the entire thing, the film, at times, feels difficult to immerse oneself in. There’s a wall of analysis brought by By Design’s faithfulness to theatrical absurdism that stands in the way of its filmic experience.

In its one-hour-and-a-half runtime and sudden tangents of obscure (and wonderfully performed) exchanges, I was reminded of Samuel Beckett’s canonical absurdist play Waiting For Godot (1953), and, specifically, Lucky’s monologue. Like the attendant’s famous rambling speech, it felt as if By Design’s profoundness was always just on the cusp of being obvious and coherent.

But, like Lucky’s speech, there is so much meaning that can be found in the indecipherable once you overcome that wall.

We’re all Camille. We all want to be unique and seen, constantly in pursuit of meaning in a world without.