The Switch is a 2010 romantic comedy directed by Will Speck and Josh Gordon, with a screenplay by Allan Loeb, starring Jennifer Aniston as Kassie, Jason Bateman as Wally, and Thomas Robinson as Sebastian, with Patrick Wilson, Juliette Lewis and Jeff Goldblum in support. It was originally titled The Baster and is adapted from a 1996 short story of that name by Jeffrey Eugenides, published in The New Yorker.

I want to start with the source material, because it reframes the entire film.

Eugenides’ short story ends with the bathroom scene that gives this film its title. That is where it finishes. Which means that essentially everything in the back half of this movie, all of the bonding, all of the emotional material, the entire relationship between Wally and Sebastian, was invented wholesale by the filmmakers. NPR’s review made this point directly, noting that the film takes a full hour’s worth of creative licence after the source material has concluded, and that screenwriter Allan Loeb and the directors were so determined to pry a romantic comedy out of Eugenides’ acrid little story that they wound up gutting it completely.

Which brings me neatly to the thing I felt while watching it. This was a really weird toxic friendship, or relationship, or whatever it is, from the start of the film through to the end of it. Something about the dynamic never settled.

And there appear to be concrete reasons for that. One reviewer described the film as a manipulative romance about two unlikeable people and their prop of a son. Another was more specific and more useful, writing that Bateman and Aniston have zero chemistry and were clearly not intended to be love interests at some point during the writing process. If true, that would account exactly for the sensation I had, which is that the film keeps asking me to accept a romance it has not actually built.

It also reminded me of the way Jennifer behaved in The Break-Up, which I think is a fair comparison.

But the star of this film was unquestionably Sebastian, played by Thomas Robinson.

And here I find myself in total agreement with the critical consensus, which is unusual for me lately. Reviewers at the time lined up to say the same thing. One called Robinson the true revelation of the film and described his work as one of the best child performances of recent memory. Another wrote that he steals everyone’s heart. A third said that the entire film could have simply been Bateman, Robinson and Goldblum and they would have sat and watched all night, which is about as backhanded as praise gets for the people not named.