Dead Ringers opens with a bravura set piece that establishes much of the tone for what’s to come. Twin doctors Elliot and Beverly Mantle are in a bar after a hard day of delivering babies and battling emergencies when a tiresome man decides to disturb their peace with his “friendliness” and “banter”. They take it in turns to beat the verbal crap out of the dickhead – whom they decide, over his baffled objections, to name “Larry”. This perks them up at least as much as their drinks and ends in their total victory. It’s fast, fierce, very funny, properly feminist and a fine way to open a show about a pair of gynaecologist sisters bent on revolutionising maternity and women’s health care. That at least one of the pair is already edged with delicious wildness is just a bonus.
The Mantle twins are played by Rachel Weisz and what a great time she has with them both, and what a great time she gives the viewers. Beverly is the quieter, more insecure, more cerebral half of the pair and her vision of the future Mantle birthing centre revolves round the empowerment of patients and the removal of the accrued stigmas and myths around pregnancy, childbirth and women’s bits generally. Chillier Elliot is happiest in the lab and envisions a state-of-the-art facility where she can make fertility miracles happen and push the boundaries of what is feasible in bespoke babies. But I’m sure their radically different approaches will prove nothing but fruitfully complementary and definitely not tear them apart like a perineum in a breech birth.
Astute readers among you will have deduced that Prime Video’s latest offering is not a new series of the radio and TV impressionist comedy series Dead Ringers. Rather, it is a sex-swapped reimagining of the 1988 David Cronenberg film starring Jeremy Irons, who did his slightly blank but sinewy thing as Beverly and Elliot – alongside a maelstrom of dreamlike scenes involving “mutant” women. Plus, a collection of specially commissioned tools to operate on them, prescription drug abuse and gothic death tableaux. It’s great. And teaches you a lot about misogyny and the fetishistic avenues that would be pursued if only more men had the time, money and access to metallurgical artists willing to specialise in speculums.
Sex-swapping the plot is, therefore, an immediately interesting premise. It features a gynaecology clinic and a maternity ward so – although it may seem extreme to the fortunately inexperienced – the blood and gore we see is not so much Cronenberg body horror as an only slightly heightened depiction of the real thing. It is intimate and only as horrifying as an ordinarily bad birth might be. Imagine an unexpurgated and more stylishly shot One Born Every Minute. This aspect of Dead Ringers does feel invigoratingly new and, to use that horrible word Beverly loves so much, empowering – at least to me in the UK. How the depiction of a wand ultrasound, for example, with its unwanted intimacy that borders on violence – even when not state-mandated – plays in the US, where it is a part of the war over abortion access, I would be fascinated to know. Does it bring home the reality of what you’re asking of women, or does it secretly satisfy a punitive urge that is driving the whole rightwing regiment?
Dead Ringers evokes many such questions and more, especially those of race and class, as it moves through the sisters’ patients. A subjugated surrogate here, a catastrophically ignored Black family there, unexplainable miscarriages, brutal forceps deliveries, stillbirths, simple checkups that reveal conditions that can change the course of a life – and require the abandonment of a career – form an interrogation of the ethics around birth. We are taken through the wealthy renting of poorer wombs, the dismissal of female pain, the working assumption that a Black woman is worth even less than a white woman. These extremes lead us to the limits of US medicine and can-do spirit. They form a dense, challenging backdrop to the twins’ personal dramas and damage.
Coke-snorting party girl Elliot is the more obvious liability. She laughs at inappropriate moments in front of patients, she delights in their Sackler-ish, fabulously malevolent potential investor, and has a line in baby sister mockery that would do any elder sib proud. “Did you just read the Communist Manifesto this morning?” she says after Beverly laments the healthcare system. “Is,” she gasps, “is capitalism … really bad?” To be fair, she also pimps for Beverly (who is gay), chatting up women then swapping with her sister once the game is afoot. And she has the job of implanting the embryos in Beverly, who wants to have a baby, supervising the pregnancy and – at least twice so far – breaking the news that it has failed. Beverly has her hinterland, however (as anyone who agrees to be pimped for by her sister must), and the stage is set for what promises to be a rather magnificent drama, with a lean, dark, genuinely funny script by Alice Birch and two knockout performances by Weisz. Go, girls.
Dead Ringers is on Prime Video.
