After checking in to see a new Christmas movie on Netflix, fans were outraged to see a ‘unnecessary’ representation of ‘incest’.
Family Switch, starring Jennifer Garner, Ed Helms, Emma Myers, and Brady Noon, is about a family that accidentally switches bodies following a strange experience at a planetarium.
Daughter CC swaps places with her mother Jess, while son Wyatt swaps places with his father Bill… As one might expect from a body swap comedy, havoc ensues.
While some viewers found the film entertaining and engaging, others were shocked by the story’s path, particularly during a conversation between CC and Wyatt while in their parents’ bodies.
In the scenario, CC (as her mother Jess) is joined at her home by a group of ladies, one of whom says that she’s been advised that ‘couples require a minimum of 12 kisses a day merely to preserve a relationship’.
Despite CC (as Jess) saying that she and her husband had ‘kissed like 14 times’ that day, the friends aren’t convinced, and begin to chant for the couple to share a kiss.
Wyatt (playing his father Bill) is first opposed to the plan, but eventually agrees when his sister insists that the women must be on to them and that they need to kiss to show otherwise.
They eventually lock their lips together, both gagging the entire time.
It’s evident in the sequence that the siblings are disgusted by what they’ve just done, and several viewers who saw the film on Netflix felt the same way.
‘I’m watching that new movie called Family Switch and oh my lord the sudden incest is smth that was so unexpected and unnecessary…,’ one person wrote on X (formerly Twitter).
‘The random incest in Family Switch caught me so off guard,’ someone else said, while another added: ‘The incest in Family Switch was NOT needed.’
Film journalist Courtney Howard also remarked: ‘Family Switch marks a real low point body-swap comedies as it steals from all others before it without compunction. But you can thank your lucky stars they don’t go for the lowest hanging fruit: incest jokes.
‘Just kidding. Those are there. I had you.’
Jennifer addressed the two allusions in Family Switch to her iconic 2004 film 13 Going On 30, when her character Jenna, who is 13 years old, wakes up in her 30-year-old body, in a recent interview.
‘My favourite thing about this genre or this sub-genre of comedy is how physical you can be, and that you’re allowed to make faces and you’re allowed to just kind of go for it in a way that, typically, we’re all trying to be more subtle and that is not really my… that’s not where I live,’ she told ComingSoon.Net.
Family Switch is available to watch on Netflix.
