Old School. Biblically Independent.
By Kayleigh Donaldson | Film | September 11, 2026
David (Niels Schneider) is a shy photographer who shies away from big crowds and rowdy goings-on. He’d rather take photos of old buildings than hang out with other people. Still, he allows his friends to drag him out for one night on the town and a seriously wild party. There, he locks eyes with a mysterious woman (Lea Seydoux), and before he knows it, the two of them are in bed. The morning after should bring with it the usual awkward back and forth, but instead, there’s a more pressing issue: David is now in the woman’s body.
Arthur Harari co-wrote Anatomy of a Fall with his partner Justine Triet, and with The Unknown, he treads into a stranger kind of relationship drama, one more concerned with the bond between the body and the soul. The body swap genre and “STD metaphors in horror” scenario are both well-trodden territory, and here they are blended with a noir-tinged mystery and fraught existential drama steeped in misery. If that sounds like a lot, that’s because it is. Harari hasn’t made things easy for himself, adapting a comic he co-wrote with his brother and swinging for the fences. It works more often than it doesn’t, but its opacity leaves one wondering if there’s as much to this story as we’ve been led to believe.
Don’t expect an explanation for the disease that causes body swap via intercourse. The mechanics of the gimmick are unimportant to Harari, whose concerns are clearly with the allegorical implications of such a concept. The focus is on both the realities of losing your body in a very literal sense, and of losing oneself to, well, the unknown. While in the body of the woman who he discovers is named Eva, David is twitchy, awkward, almost toddler-like in his discomfort. He looks at his new body, at first with a mirror to confirm all of the intimate details, with a horror he never fully shakes. It’s even worse for the poor soul who ends up stuck in his body, a teenage girl named Malia (Lilith Grasmug) who cannot shake her disgust at becoming a man (and one 20 years older than her at that.) The distress of being violently stripped of your very being is a special kind of body horror.
The most well-known body swap stories are comedies like Freaky Friday, which revel in the shenanigans of mismatches and their newfound freedoms. A couple of very dark jokes aside, it’s remarkable how humourless The Unknown is. There’s no sly wink at the camera over the inherent silliness of the set-up, nor are there any rote scenes of David/Eva/Malia leering at one another or cracking one-liners about periods or chest hair. One moment where Malia asks an invasive question that could have been spun as funny becomes another instance of violation for everyone involved. Neither David/Eva or Malia/David can bring themselves to shower, so terrified are they by the idea of confronting their new bodies in the nude. And every instance of sex is totally passionless. It’s been a while since I’ve seen a film portray consensual sex with this level of misery. It’s both primal and seemingly pleasureless, an act done by a predator with a sinister agenda.
The trans aspect of the story is evident, with David/Eva/Malia dealing with the all-consuming distress of living in a gender that is not theirs. Both Schneider and Seydoux do an excellent job in conveying this pain with the smallest of gestures and expressions. Schneider is particularly good when playing Malia, whose fragility feels familiarly adolescent and all too relatable. But it’s not just about gender. The fear of changing beyond what you and your loved ones are willing to accept as your truth is a painful experience for all of us, regardless of circumstance. Certainly, I would like to hear from trans critics on how gender dysphoria as a vessel for a humanist quandary, plays to them. Harari’s trying to keep a lot of balls in the air with The Unknown, and that hunt for universality may come at the expense of some much-needed specificity.
The Unknown had its Canadian premiere at the 2026 Toronto International Film Festival. It will be released by Neon later this year.
