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.
Zimmerman, body-swapped and portrayed by Léa Seydoux, in The Unknown.
By and large, The Unknown eschews all of these genre trappings; it is a humorless 139-minute psychological thriller that is unconcerned with Zimmerman’s class — which is a non-descript middle-class — and altered gender, which interacts with his lived experience only briefly in a precarious scene involving a straight man at a moment when Zimmerman is unaware of his now femme-presenting gender. In The Unknown, Zimmerman, following their body-swap, becomes endlessly concerned with returning to their original body. Along the course of this austere investigation, Zimmerman eventually encounters their past body, since transposed with a new consciousness, Malia, played very briefly by Lilith Grasmug. From here on, their investigation continues, following the trail of previous individuals with body-swap experiences, before needing to reckon with their own relationship. Malia and Zimmerman, to this effect, have a silent yet tragic chemistry that allows them to effortlessly lead the film. Their character study slowly reveals each of their vulnerabilities, as well as their divergent ability to reckon with this new condition. While Zimmerman, throughout the film, continuously feels displaced by their new body, Malia is far more accepting.
The most notable previous work from director and writer Arthur Harari, Anatomy of a Fall, does not share any obvious similarities with The Unknown. Yet, they both return to questions of the nature of truth and reality. Whereas Anatomy of a Fall takes an epistemological view, exemplified by its numerous courtroom scenes, The Unknown ontologically queries the existence of objects, most specifically the self. Rather than concerning itself with class or gender as a vehicle for body-swapping, The Unknown explores the horror that inherently comes with depersonalization. Martin Heidegger, in his monumental 1927 work, Being and Time, formulates a theory of self that is defined by a Being-in-the-world, existing as relationships amid the broader world. Through this lens, Heidegger formulates the concept of Dasein, or sense of being-there, which is often conceptualized as entanglement with the lived environment. Although Heidegger often frames the body itself as purely a physical manifestation, an object of perception, The Unknown uproots the Dasein in its focus on the body. By foregrounding bodily loss and mutilation rather than the body’s transparent, functional presence, the film severs the assumed continuity between self and corporeal form that Dasein takes for granted. Zimmerman’s concept of the soul or self, as an amorphous concept, is removed from the corporeal form of the body, and with that, his being becomes unstable.
Notably, Zimmerman, as a photographer, continues a project that his father began, taking photos of the mutable Parisian landscape. Thus, in documenting the changing city, implicitly, the Dasein, or sense of being-there, is weakened. This parallels the sense of individuality that is lost with Zimmerman’s removal from his body. While the body swap of the film explicitly strips Zimmerman of his corporeal form, even before the body swap, Zimmerman displays a depressed attitude. The only aspect of his life, devoid of hobbies and friends, that is displayed in The Unknown is the archival-like act of cataloguing Paris, a city itself that is undergoing a type of body-swap, wherein the soul may be retained, but the physical exterior is constantly undergoing metamorphosis. Zimmerman’s body-swap thereby acts as a physical manifestation of a metaphysical loss of self — or, as Heidegger might term it, inauthenticity in the world — as Zimmerman has already felt unmoored in place and purpose, documenting a city repeatedly replaced by modernity and living a purposeless life, inheriting the responsibilities of his father.
At the center of this depersonalization is a metamorphosis — whether that is of the city, the body, or the mind — which also occurs with schizophrenia. Zimmerman and Malia, in the film, eventually find another individual who underwent a body swap several years earlier, portrayed by Victoire Du Bois. In the years since the body-swap, labelled a liar by everyone but her brother, this former victim was labelled schizophrenic and institutionalized, until she conformed to her assigned identity. Irarrázaval’s phenomenological study of schizophrenia displays the resonance of this analogy. The schizophrenic effect may be that of disembodiment, where the ‘self’ is split from the perceived body. While research disputes the exact degree to which body ownership is disrupted in schizophrenia, the metamorphosis of the self that occurs in schizophrenia nonetheless leads to social ostracization and abandonment by caretakers. Just as Kafka’s The Metamorphosis may act as an allegory for the disrupted phenomenological experience of illness, Zimmerman’s encounter with this former victim, now labeled a schizophrenic, transitions The Unknown from dealing with the pulp genre of body-swapping to a far more novel paradigm: interrogating the depersonalization that occurs with schizophrenia. After the former victim kicks out Zimmerman for attempting to remind them of their true identity, they never reappear in the film. While this may be viewed as an abrupt ending for them, it also mirrors the tragic reality many individuals with schizophrenia face: being permanently cut off from loved ones and cast out of their own lives, regardless of any mythical body-swap.
The metamorphosis of the self in Schizophrenia. Bryan Charnley Self Portrait series 15.
In this interrogation of the self and its brief foray into how disembodiment relates to schizophrenia, The Unknown is at its most interesting. When not concerned with this topic, the film often feels burdened by its own weight and juggling of themes. Its conclusion rests on Zimmerman’s decision to keep a child that was his own, conceived during his first encounter with the unknown woman who caused the body swap. This verges into the interesting territory of the consequences of abortion that are differentially expressed in women than men, yet Zimmerman’s inversion is mostly neglected. Even the transmission method of unprotected sex, not unlike 2014’s It Follows’ metaphorical STI, is a detail in the film, not a focus. This unclear thematic tension is only further exacerbated by vague political commentary earlier in the film, including a drug-fueled party where attendees destroy giant piñatas shaped like world leaders, including Donald Trump. Furthermore, queer-readings of this film may interrogate how gender identity is portrayed, specifically gender dysphoria, when dysphoria is reframed as a forceful removal of cis-identity, as occurs with Zimmerman. Notwithstanding these complications and unanswered questions, the metamorphosis of self that occurs in real-life, divorced from body-swaps, leaves the viewer with the existential horror of depersonalization.
The Unknown had its world premiere at the Cannes Film Festival in 2026 and has been acquired by Neon for a 2026 North American release.
Kit Neikirk (he/him) is an MA candidate in Health Humanities in the Centre for Multidisciplinary and Intercultural Inquiry (CMII) within the School of European Languages, Culture and Society (SELCS) at University College London. As an academic, his research is concerned with how illness and grief are differentially expressed across media.
