Switch (2011) poster
2011 · crime · action · thriller

Switch

Directed by Frédéric Schoendoerffer1h 44m2011
ElsewhereIMDb6.34kRT33%
  • sombre
  • kinetic
  • intense
  • cold
Movie DNA

Sombre, breathless, measured crime / action, grounded in texture. Ambivalent, mid-stakes, cold, hand-scored across twelve axes of taste.

How every film is hand-scored →

In Montreal, the unemployed fashion designer Sophie Malaterre is shown a website, switch.com, where it is possible to switch houses with a stranger for vacation. Sophie seeks an apartment in Paris nearby the Eiffel Tower that belongs to Bénédicte Serteaux and they change apartments. Sophie arrives in Paris on Saturday morning. The next morning, policemen break in the apartment and arrest Sophie while she is having a bath. Detective Damien Forgeat interrogates Sophie believing that she is Bénédicte and she learns that a beheaded body was found in her room and all evidence of her life has been deleted.

Our read · Switch (2011) reads as a sombre, breathless, grounded crime · action · thriller entry — measured in intensity, mid-stakes in scope, cold in temperature, ambivalent in outlook. Hand-scored on twelve axes of taste — mood, pacing, weirdness, hope, stakes, humour, reality, density, warmth, auteur, intensity, and era — with a derived palette drawn from its dominant cinematography.

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The shape of Switch

Tonight, this looks like

What watching it is actually like.

You want a French thriller about a house swap vacation that spirals into crime and pursuit.

ends unsettlingit stays with yousteady all the waygrips by minute 20attention 3/5earns its lengthsubtitles: full
Date nightWith friendsSoloWith parentsKids around
Heads-upgraphic violence

Skip it tonightYou want fast paced action or hate slow building mysteries with subtitles.

If Switch is your film
The Holiday (2006)
house swap premise with romance and mixup
(much lighter romcom no thriller)
Pacific Heights (1990)
tenant from hell turns home into nightmare
(more horror than crime thriller)
Caché (2005)
French psychological thriller with paranoia and mystery
(much slower and more cerebral)
DNA · twelve axes

The reading.

Each axis is hand-scored — not derived from votes or genre averages. The marker shows where this film sits; the gradient fill uses the film's own cinematography palette.

Mood · HeavyCosy
Pacing · Slow-burnKinetic
Intensity · GentleExtreme
Weirdness · ConventionalSurreal
Hope · NihilisticRedemptive
Stakes · IntimateEpic
Humour · NoneBroad
Reality · GroundedFantastical
Density · SparseTwisty
Warmth · ColdTender
Auteur · TransparentSignature
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