Kit Neikirk
The anticipated next film from Anatomy of a Fall (2023) director Arthur Harari, The Unknown (French: L’Inconnue, 2026), bills itself as a body-swap horror. In it, after a brief sexual encounter beneath a subdued club light, a lonely and slightly off-putting Parisian street photographer, David Zimmerman (Niels Schneider), swaps bodies with an unknown woman (Léa Seydoux) he sleeps with. This concept has been thoroughly explored – from the body horror characteristic of Brandon Cronenberg’s Possessor (2020) to the racial allegory of Jordan Peele’s Get Out (2017). In this genre, the concept of body swapping is generally contextualized as desirable and steeped in class politics; in Possessor, the bodies of the poor are colonized by the wealthy, used as corporate property that undergoes swapping. Get Out, meanwhile, uses body swapping to embody the simultaneous White fetishization and otherization of the Black body. This is not to mention the long-standing comedic potential of this genre, spanning from 2003’s family comedy Freaky Friday to the explicitly Scream-inspired comedy-horror Freaky (2020). Meanwhile, contemporary reimagining of the body-swap genre is ripe with trans-gender interpretations, best exemplified by Jane Schoenbrun’s I Saw the TV Glow (2024), wherein the body swap is intertwined with the transposing of oneself onto fandoms and alternative realities as an escape from gender dysphoria.
