Brandon Broussard’s Essence Fest Best Short winner is funny, sharp, and feature-ready.
There’s a difference between a short film that’s simply well-made and one that leaves an audience already lobbying for a feature-length follow-up before the credits roll. Switches is squarely the latter.
Starring Sinqua Walls and Chanté Adams as Jake and Dawn, a married couple sliding toward divorce, the film opens on familiar terrain: two people who once had it all, the career momentum, the chemistry, the “it couple” energy, now buried under bills, resentment, and distance. Enter Switch, the trial drug from a hush-hush pharmaceutical company promising an “empathy revolution” by letting couples swap consciousness for 24 hours. The rules are simple: no alcohol, no sex, no other stimulants. Naturally, complications follow, and by the time the pair try to switch back, they’ve been handed a twist that reframes the entire premise. Dawn’s body is now pregnant, which means Jake, still inside her, is too. The only way out is to ride out the pregnancy or end it. Roll credits.
It’s a premise that invites the obvious comparison, and Broussard doesn’t dodge it, he leans in. At one point Dawn asks the doctor point-blank if this is “like Freaky Friday.” He shoots back, “yes, but not a movie,” a quick, self-aware beat that clears the air and frees Switches to be its own thing. And it is: where Freaky Friday is a mother-daughter story about generational understanding, Switches is a marriage story about what it actually costs two people to walk in each other’s shoes when the relationship is already on shaky ground.
The performances are doing a lot of heavy lifting, and they clear the bar with room to spare. Adams, playing a man’s consciousness inside her own body, finds a physical specificity, the walk, the posture, the way Jake occupies space, that reads as genuinely funny without tipping into caricature. Walls, meanwhile, gets his own showcase moment in a gym scene that’s already a highlight reel clip in the making. Together, they sell both the comedy and the emotional stakes underneath it, which is the harder trick.
Switches is funny, sharp, and consistently enjoyable, the kind of short where getting through the 20 minutes is a breeze rather than a chore. It also doubles as a genuine conversation starter, the kind of premise built for group chats and couples’ movie nights alike, where everyone walks away with an opinion on what they’d do in Dawn and Jake’s position. Broussard has already proven, in just 20 minutes, that he has the writing chops to take this world on a longer ride that fits.
Since premiering and taking home Best Short at the Essence Film Festival, the film has continued its festival run, including a slot at the Oscar-qualifying BronzeLens Film Festival in Atlanta, good company for a project that’s building real buzz beyond the circuit.
Social reaction to the trailer and the short itself has been loud and consistent: audiences want the feature, and most have only seen the trailer. Investment companies should be paying attention. It’s not hard to see why. A full-length version has an obvious runway, following Dawn and Jake through an actual pregnancy while their consciousnesses stay swapped is rich, specific territory, and there’s something quietly powerful about a story that puts a man inside the physical and emotional experience of pregnancy without losing its sense of humor. And they want Walls and Adams to stay exactly where they are.
Switches has already done what a short is supposed to do: announce a filmmaker, showcase two stars operating at full range, and leave people wanting more. Broussard, a Howard University alum and USC Writing Fellow with more than 15 years writing and producing for the likes of Lionsgate, Netflix, and Warner Bros., clearly knows how to build a world efficiently. Now the industry just needs to let him finish building this one.
The Bottom Line: Funny, original, and emotionally sharper than its logline suggests, Switches is the rare short film that earns the “give me the feature” reaction it’s getting.