Sinister Switch – Film Review

Parents Kristen (Emily Alatalo) and Justin (Steve Belford) are thrilled when their kidnapped daughter, Olivia (Natalie Jane), returns home after being missing for six years. However, they soon have their suspicions that the girl is not their daughter after all.

As soon as I saw the title and poster for Christopher Redmond‘s Sinister Switch, I immediately thought it was trying to be a ripoff of Freaky – thankfully, it is not but, however, it is a straight-to-television movie. But, you know what? It actually may be one of the best straight-to-television movies I’ve ever seen despite the fact that it’s still not quite good. It runs at an extremely breezy eighty-six minutes meaning that, even if you hated this movie, it would be over relatively quickly.

I think one of the reasons why this movie didn’t annoy me is because of the fact that nothing really happens until the final twenty minutes or so. Yes, I absolutely wish that this film had more to do and more to say, but it’s kind of hard to make fun of a movie where nothing happens simply because, well, it has little substance. Oftentimes these straight-to-television movies are jam-packed with tons of cringy scenes, awful dialogue, hilariously poor characters – the list goes on. But Sinister Switch surprisingly doesn’t have those elements at play. It just kind of plays out like an indie thriller and that was kind of nice to see.

Granted, this movie doesn’t really do anything as I mentioned above. When young Olivia comes home, it immediately becomes clear to not only her parents but also to us as a viewer, that there is something quite wrong with Olivia. She is barely speaking and she acts as though she doesn’t really know who her parents are and is simply pretending to. Can you guess what the big “twist” in the movie is? If you did – congratulations! You win an award for guessing what is perhaps one of the most predictable movie endings of the entire year. It’s so obvious it’s actually kind of ridiculous.

Sadly, as I mentioned, we aren’t treated to a lot of highly interesting scenes along the way to make up for the underwhelming ending. Sinister Switch is essentially just a hodgepodge of sequences of a young girl acting bizarre for eighty-six minutes with no substance injected into the script whatsoever. Emily Alatalo does a great job at portraying Kristen as an extremely worried mother who just wants the best for her daughter and to make sure she’s okay. Alatalo doesn’t do anything Oscar-worthy here – not even close – but for the role she needed to play, she did it well.

The same thing can also be said about Steve Belford. It’s just a shame that that’s the extent of their characters. They simply play worried parents – all depth and characterization have basically been thrown out the window here. The only character that gets a little bit of development is Natalie Jane’s Olivia and even still, I wish we could’ve learned a lot more about her backstory because it’s just told to us in bits and pieces in some exposition dumps along the way.

But because of how uneventful and just “meh” Sinister Switch is, I can’t say that this film is atrociously bad. I didn’t hate myself for watching this and you probably won’t either. Just know going into it that you’re probably going to forget it the very next day.