In many ways, the kind of post-pandemic lull that lingered on ‘films’ per se, and movies alike, seems to have been fully lifted in 2023. Despite the SAG-AFTRA strike—being the near monumental watershed that it was—affecting attendance and releases in the second half of the year, both the summer and festival seasons were buzzing with fresh releases. For the most part, if you were at the cinema, chances were that you would have been spoiled for choice, both in quantity and quality. An expanded arsenal of films and an increased influx of capital that 2023 was generally building towards would be keen to imply an escalation in production quality, and a general upscaling in the worlds that the film and its characters would come to occupy. From dramas rooted in everyday to historical epics demanding accurate recreation, to fantastical films—both cautionary science fiction and escapist reveries—it is a curated ensemble of spaces, buildings, environs, objects, subjects, and much more, material and immaterial, that not only constitutes the world of the film but makes it believable. The subversions may come later, but it is what the actors and performers respond to, as much as they do to their fellow performers. It is thus a study of the material, but more so how it impinges upon and completes the immaterial that this list of the best of production design in films from 2023 seeks to harp upon.

The instrinsicity of the relationship between film and architecture or design underlines this affectation, this harping upon. From Modernism’s mediatic afflictions on film being the bona fide medium for the documentation and display of architecture as opposed to the unmoving image, to computer-aided design and modelling making the modern Hollywood blockbuster feasible, architecture and design have been, and continue to be, at the forefront of cinematic world-building. More recently, even the largely urban concept of placemaking can be seen transposing into films, where certain films become representative of or remind one of a particular city or place viewers may not even have visited yet—a phenomenon I align with the internationalisation of cinema. Now, in the build-up to the Oscars ceremony in 2024, the official nominations would perhaps be the closest to sealing the list of best production designs in films in the past year. In the end, however, I do believe it to be a race between Poor Things and Barbie for the top prize, both essential but polarly different feminist subversions on the classicality of space and the built, even as the next year looks pretty ruled out with the delay behind Dune: Part Two shifting it to the first quarter of 2024.

Reparative history, ordered chaos in a fictional space town, biographical horrors that changed the world, a pink utopia, an AI powered hostile takeover, and a Gothically uncanny Frankenstein revival with a gender swap—in no particular order, a ‘wrapped’ on the best of production design achievements that STIRred the film world in 2023.

Barbie

Expectedly the hot favourite, Barbie is one half of the ‘Barbenheimer’ phenomenon that swept pop culture this year and has been a talking point for the better part of it. Playful, provocative, and gleefully pink to the point of causing a global shortage of paint, Barbie mines on the nascent ‘Barbiecore’ mania, adding its twists to the veritable dollhouse aesthetic that has consumed interior design tabloids for years on end. Production designer Sarah Greenwood modelled Barbie’s feminist utopia as a Palm Springs-like beachside neighbourhood with semi-open Barbie Dreamhouses to be inhabited by actors. While the blowing up of these dollhouses from their miniature forms to ‘inhabitable’ houses effectively surpassed the need for realism in film sets in favour of wanton over-the-top-ness, the plasticity in the overall world design of Barbie also succeeds in driving home the point about shallow consumerism—something the doll and its makers have been criticised about often. 

Through the medium of the iconic doll, the film then essentially strives to tell a story (admittedly with its own pitfalls though) about feminism in the 21^st century, occasionally toying with the idea of free will, and the contrast between the squeaky clean, perfectly doctored dream houses and the ‘real world’ is extremely well done in that vein. The references to Tati’s Playhouse in Mattel’s dour office cubicles only double up on that and aren’t amiss as a reference to iconic instances of architecture on film.

Poor Things

Bolder and more provocative than its feminist but fantastical counterpart in Barbie, Poor Things is absurdist, surrealist, and unconventional in every way imaginable—in true Lanthimos fashion—and that ethos of weirdness seeps into the production design too. The two films share more parallels than visible on the surface, and while the race between them for the top prize should be an interesting one, I do believe that the provocative, almost doctored twisting of conventionality in the spaces inhabited by Poor Things fall only a millimeter short of being called art themselves. The film takes an eccentric gender-bender approach to the Frankenstein story, and the inane humanity behind the seemingly irredeemable monster created. The sets and the overall production reflect that eerie, dreamy quality in space, motifs, and especially costumes and colour grading even, wildly switching between a Neo-Gothic Baroque fusion and Impressionist looking, painted backgrounds at whim. The uncanny is right at home with Poor Things, and it’s all part of the design that just works.

Killers of the Flower Moon

Based on David Grann’s novel of the same name, Martin Scorsese’s 206-minute long, lavish retelling of the horrific murders and systematic ousting of tribals and native peoples of the Osage Nation after oil was discovered on their land in 1920s Oklahoma is a dramatic Western and procedural rolled into one. More than anything though, it is a troubling reminder of the evils of settler colonialism and the lack of accountability or reparations for displaced people, looked at through a historical lens. The film itself lands a crater away from masterpiece, but is as quintessentially Scorsese as can be.

Production designer Jack Fisk draws on his noticeable experience of working on There Will Be Blood in recreating the reservation of Fairfax from the 1920s, of which only vestigial traces of a town remain today. The locations, both interior and exterior, bring into play and are responsive to the topography of the arid land, once rich in black gold. In many ways, the moments in which the rather understated design of the Americas of the 1920s shines is moments of juxtaposition. Fisk worked closely with Osage artisans to embellish the quintessential timber barn typology with traditional and culturally enriched motifs, sculptures, and other art. In an otherwise sombre order of proceedings, even the colourfully patterned shawls and scarves worn by the Osage people stand out and have something to say.

Oppenheimer

Perhaps the most complete directorial vision this year that also amassed a huge sum at the box office, Oppenheimer was in every way more than a biopic of the eponymous father of the atomic bomb, always alluding to the broader global ramifications of a scientific innovation that changed the world forever, and the human cost in both lives lost and the ghost of a man Oppenheimer was by the end of the legal proceedings against him. In just a few sequences, director Christopher Nolan manages to capture the essential shift in thinking and a way of being for the world to industrial modern backed by science that preceded the horrors of the Second World War. That, for me, is where the success of Oppenheimer as a production lies and where its design truly comes together as something illusory to grand.

Nolan directs Oppenheimer on both colour and black and white film, parts of it in lavish 70mm in what is his biggest outing with the format to date, and even that choice reflects in the production design. For instance, very few interior shots feature colour, especially inside the courtroom, and the same is true for the opposite of that setting. The other most significant production achievement of the film is its recreation of Los Alamos at Ghost Ranch in New Mexico, complete with the drop site, labs, and homes of the town’s residents, never once escaping—better still, confronting—the vast nothingness and the non-human in the act.

Asteroid City

The second film in the list featuring a production design that comes absolutely alive in sparse settlements constructed from scratch across vast stretches of American desert, Wes Anderson’s latest feature film Asteroid City was a valiant attempt at decoding a visual grammar of grief and its human aftermath, replete with plenty of quirk and style. Though browns and beiges dominate the film’s colour palettes owing to its setting in a remote desert town, the signature two tone sets make sure Anderson's beloved pastels pop and shine through, in much the same way as the sleepy desert town finds itself activated with visitors for the Junior Stargazer convention.

Production designer Adam Stockhausen sets the drama in a quaint Spanish desert instead, building the entire carnival-like setting of Anderson’s eponymous Asteroid City from scratch. The urbanity, the scale of it all, is continually impressive, despite Anderson’s signature quirk and iconoclastic characters. That is also especially true given the comical absurdism, the poster-like visual language, and the two dimensionality of the build to suit Anderson's non perspectival framing of shots for the most part. While this one might have been strictly for the fans and was mostly a miss on take-home beats, its design was the clear standout with Anderson’s trusted cadre of collaborators. For the architecturally informed, the setting seemed to have clear allusions to Venturi and Scott Brown’s 'decorated shed' from their Learnings from Las Vegas.

The Creator

This is a film whose underperformance was baffling to say the least. Despite walking familiar beats, the topicality of the film’s core idea, along with the wide-eyed earnestness and only slightly derivative yet original narrative in the realm of sci-fi storytelling—which we haven’t seen an awful lot of lately—should have made it a rather persistent point of conversation among film goers. That core idea—the search for an essential humanity in a world overrun by AI technology and robots—manifests well in a more hybrid design scheme that brings both the machinic and natural together.

The film is set in 2070, 15 years after AI detonates a nuclear warhead in Los Angeles, California, throwing the Western nations in a state of war and natural distrust against AI and its manifested, peripheral technologies. The design dichotomy between these nations, and a 'New Asia' comfortable with the use of AI, is mined well and furthers a pertinent socio-political strand from our current world—the very sign of good science fiction. The search for the eponymous creator, the architect behind the world altering AI technology, revealed early on to be a young child, takes the film’s characters deep into both ruins and techno-utopias, and director Gareth Edwards’ choice of locations in East Asian landscapes in these parts yields some fantastic shots. One of the more peculiar framing exercises in film this year with its super wide aspect ratio and being entirely shot on film with the unmistakable grain, The Creator has originality in design and intent—from villages and new cities to authoritarian structures to even spacecrafts. Even in its not-so-terrifying vision of the future, given AI’s current relevance today, the film does lend a pertinent talking point on the opportunities and perils of AI, along with pinning a visual to that thought.

STIRred 2023 wraps up the year with compilations of the best in architecture, art, and design from STIR. Did your favourites make the list? Tell us in the comments!