Photo Illustration by Thomas Levinson/The Daily Beast/Netflix
Trading places is as much a holiday tradition as mulled wine and mistletoe. From cases of mistaken identity (A Christmas Prince) to identical people swapping roles (The Princess Switch) and lonely hearts switching houses (The Holiday), the trope has long been a hallmark of romantic comedies, family dramas, and Christmas-themed fare that falls somewhere between the two. That such unlikely exchanges often lead to characters gaining much-needed perspective on their lives, love, and family only adds to the warm-hearted charm of these films—especially when said characters find themselves literally trapped in each other’s bodies, thanks to a light sprinkling of Tinseltown magic.
Family Switch, Netflix’s latest holiday release (streaming Nov. 30), follows in the footsteps of Freaky Friday—the ’70s original and the aughts Disney remake—while doubling down on its cosmic body-swapping shenanigans. This time around, the switcheroos befall an entire dysfunctional family, rather than just an at-odds mother and daughter, setting up four actors to deliver comically outsized dual performances of adolescence and middle age.
Chief among those is a delightfully enthusiastic turn by Jennifer Garner, returning to the body-swap genre nearly 20 years after 13 Going on 30. She plays matriarch Jess Walker, who divides her days between family life and her thriving career at a respected architectural firm, struggling to find a balance between the two. Set in Los Angeles, where the sun shines even as Christmas lights adorn the neighborhood, Family Switch opens with Jess and her husband, high school music teacher Bill (The Office’s Ed Helms), decked out in red-and-white Santa Claus regalia. They’re eager to film one of their family’s traditional Christmas-time music videos but unable to even momentarily capture the attention of their children, Yale-bound teenage brainiac Wyatt (Good Boys’ Brady Noon) and rising soccer star CC (Wednesday’s Emma Myers). A family of overachievers, they all appear to be heading in different directions, a realization that gives Jess a particularly sharp pang around the holidays.