The original has been described as “cold and creepy” “uniquely disturbing” and “unnerving but also enthralling”. It electrified some and appalled others, with its meditation on obsession and its depiction of human disintegration. Now David Cronenberg’s 1988 cult classic, Dead Ringers, has been turned into a blow-your-socks-off six-part Prime Video series, and it’s about to become a classic in its own right.
Elliot and Beverly Mantle are two extraordinarily talented British obstetricians living in New York, both working at the same hospital. They’re also bonkers, rich, co-dependent, sometimes cruel, naughty, absolutely gorgeous, identical twins – and both played by the beguiling Rachel Weisz.
Elliot, the darker, crueller, explicitly madder sister, focuses on research. She takes drugs, has casual sex with men, and makes sometimes hilarious, always savage, comments. She wants to grow a baby to full term from a petri dish – which is incredibly difficult, not to mention highly illegal. But she’s devilishly clever and she might actually achieve it, God help us.
Meanwhile, Beverly, the kinder, more sensitive of the two, wants to make the birthing system better. There’s a mind-boggling early scene in which the twins deliver baby after baby after baby, to a pulsating score. But despite their best efforts, and to Beverly’s heartbreak, some women fall through the net. It motivates the sisters to set up a world-leading birthing centre, which looks like a strange hybrid of a Star Trek set and Google’s silicon valley offices, with definite Handmaid’s Tale undertones (the doctors wear red scrubs and white lab coats – also harking back to the original Dead Ringers).
Even with their differences, the sisters are perfectly in sync: in fact, the twins are totally obsessed with each other; they live for each other and are very clearly meant to be two halves of a whole. Their good/bad sides are far more subtle than Jekyll and Hyde, but there is definitely something Jungian going on, their personalities working as subconscious and conscious elements of one full person.
Everything changes when Beverly falls in love with a beautiful actress, Genevieve (persuasively played by Britne Oldford). Elliot can’t handle it, and their impossibly close relationship takes a terrifyingly dark turn.
Hilarious, mad, scathing, brutal, and perfectly executed dialogue highlights both the brilliance of the writing team (which was led by Succession and Normal People writer Alice Birch) and the incredible skills of the shows’ actors – though Weisz, who also executive produces, is very much the standout. She’s clearly enjoying herself hugely, and embodies both these very different characters with ease. Her many scenes as both twins have been smoothly pieced together, so you really do feel like there are two completely insane, brilliant doctors bickering with each other.
There are other storylines too – the siblings’ parents come to visit, they court billionaire investor Rebecca (a vicious Jennifer Ehle), and their housekeeper, Greta (Poppy Liu) is a real character. But it’s Elliot and Beverly’s relationship that takes centre stage here as they focus on using cutting-edge science to improve women’s experience of pregnancy, a fraught subject to say the least – the show touches on surrogacy, abortion, miscarriage, menopause, fertility and the ethics of the ever-increasing role of technology in this once-natural process.
I haven’t had a child, or tried to have one, and that experience would no doubt change the impact of the many stories and scenes in the series – some, including a graphic miscarriage, a terrible haemorrhage and a stillbirth, may be incredibly triggering. But, for people my age, the next decade will be spent determining who will and will not carry babies, which will in turn determine the conversations that we have for the rest of our lives.
It’s at least partly this that makes Elliot and Beverly’s ideas so brilliantly thought-provoking and terrifying: this is one of life’s defining conversations. But it’s not just about babies. It’s about how far humans will go for what we want; altruism and the capabilities of science. Beverly’s mantra “pregnancy isn’t a disease”, which summarises her efforts to improve the system so that women don’t die or lose their babies, or both, drives the message home.
This clever series pushes so much further than Cronenberg’s thriller horror film about the self-destruction of twin brother gynaecologists. The sleek original was partly about fertility, but this storyline faded into the background as the brothers started to unravel. And it oozed misogyny, not only in the brothers’ often disgusting dialogue, but also because of the clear dynamic between the male doctors and their female clients (one of whom, in the film, Elliot later mutilates).
But when Weisz’s twins talk about sex, when Elliot asks male clients to show her their penises when their wives leave the room, or seduces women and then passes them onto Beverly, the behaviours are somehow even more perverse and shocking – the inversion of the power structures, the male exploitation, rather than female, draws attention to just how remarkably accustomed we are to sexism when it comes from a man.
Dead Ringers’ propelling and subversive tale provokes a thousand thoughts, some of which are frankly disturbing, while managing to delight, surprise and thrill. And what’s more, it keeps its momentum to the end. The finale is truly shocking; perfectly at one with the rest of this fantastic piece of work.
