Amazon’s limited six-episode adaptation of David Cronenberg’s 1988 feature film Dead Ringers isn’t a perfect series, but it is a perfect piece of intellectual property in at least three key respects.
First, series creator Alice Birch (Normal People) has a clear reason to grapple with Cronenberg’s twisted tale of identical twin gynecologists, using the added narrative reality of television and the passage of 35 years as fodder for an investigation into reproductive freedom and the fertility industry, which is all by itself. It is a spectacular themed vehicle.
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The End Result A worthwhile remake with a distinctive perspective and an outstanding central performance.
air date: Friday April 21 (Amazon)
Pour: Rachel Weisz, Britne Oldford, Poppy Liu, Michael Chernus, Jennifer Ehle
Creator: Alice Birch
Equally important, Dead Ringers is a spectacular acting vehicle, and in Elliot and Beverly Mantle Rachel Weisz has the best role or dual roles of her decorated career, a blend of uncompromising intensity, dark humor and sprawling heartache that’s as satisfying to watch as it is clearly was to play.
Finally, and this might be aimed primarily at David Cronenberg obsessives, this Dead Ringers will do absolutely nothing to your memories of the original film. Minus the initial premise – which itself was adapted from the Bari Wood and Jack Geasland novel Twins – and a few quoted images and snippets of dialogue, this Dead Ringers is its own thing. It’s weird and unsettling and nightmarish, but entirely on its own terms, leaving Cronenberg’s distinctive take on body horror safe and sane and, if you’ve been watching it lately, reasonably undated. Weisz is sensational, and her Elliot and Beverly Mantle don’t borrow or take anything away from Jeremy Irons’ award-winning performance in the film.
Isn’t it nice when that happens? Isn’t it rare?
We meet Elliot and Beverly at work in a Manhattan hospital. They look exactly alike and share a sterile apartment run by the mysterious Greta (Poppy Liu), but they are very different people. Reclusive and socially anxious, Beverly is filled with great compassion for her patients. Outgoing and hilarious, Elliot is more interested in groundbreaking research than interacting with emotional moms-to-be. They dream of a clinic that will transform the country’s relationship with childbirth, but this shared dream comes from two very different perspectives. Elliot wants to advance science in an environment that allows it to break the shackles of FDA oversight and worldly ethics. Beverly wants to foster an environment where reproduction is normalized and tailored, rather than treated as a disease and run down a hospital assembly line.
The Mantle twins get their chance thanks to an investment by billionaire Rebecca (a wonderfully icy Jennifer Ehle), part of a not very veiled Sackler-like family, and her wife Susan (Emily Meade, a nicely earthy counterpoint to Ehle). , whose own family legacy comes into play in the memorable fifth episode of the season. Achieving that dream exposes cracks in the relationship between the Mantle twins, as does Beverly’s relationship with TV star Genevieve (Britne Oldford in a variation on the role Geneviève Bujold plays in the film), the first relationship the twins have not “shared,” so to speak.
The difference between the versions of Dead Ringers can be summed up in the differences between their respective coats and their approach to their profession.
As men, Cronenberg’s Mantles are fascinated by gynecology, but at heart they are voyeurs. They will always treat women and their bodies as alien territory that needs to be dug up first (with special equipment!) and then understood. It’s not Cronenberg’s purest exploration of gynophobia – The Brood, with its roots in the director’s own divorce, struck me ever more deeply – but its alienated mirror of the shifting or mutation of gender roles is a prime snapshot of the late ’80s.
In Birch’s vision, this is personal and immediate, gory and visceral. It is less than five minutes into the series before Beverly has her first miscarriage graphically depicted. When Cronenberg’s film asks, “What’s the worst thing you can imagine in this milieu?” From a man’s point of view, Birch’s series scoffs, “Dudes, you have no idea.” Recent dark comedy This Is Going to Hurt by AMC+ provided a glimpse into a world of forceps and cesareans, fractures and prolapses, but Dead Ringers makes even the most harrowing imagery in This Is Going to Hurt look like Bluey.
But this Dead Ringers isn’t just a crude exploration of the dehumanizing way Western medicine treats childbirth. In the aforementioned fifth episode, directed by Karyn Kusama with uneasy flair, the show traces the roots of modern gynecology back to the exploitative experiments of J. Marion Sims, as if to say, “Is it a wonder how it came about?” ?” The show reflects the commodification of fertility processes in which actual women’s experiences are replaced with profits and artificial limitations. Real empathy is required here.
Plus, it’s a direct attack on eons of archetypes that suggest duality is required for a woman who is both ambitious and maternal. Elliot and Beverly may begin the series with each portraying a page of this binary, but it’s no surprise that their arcs change direction, although extending this inevitable psychological reversal beyond six hours isn’t always smooth. For a closed-ended limited series — and please, Amazon, don’t think this one has a second season — Dead Ringers is surprisingly episodic, each episode building on a fundraising retreat, a drug party, or an ill-fated journey to a clinic opening .
Despite all of the stressful medical procedures presented by the series’ directors, beginning with Sean Durkin, Birch builds on her theatrical background to turn the drawn-out dinner scenes that anchor multiple episodes into the series’ most terrifying moments. Systemic medical dehumanization is scary, but the more intimate dehumanization of sitting in cramped spaces with strangers or even loved ones, trying unsuccessfully to find common ground or shared joy can be far worse.
The series is confident about the points it wants to make, but it’s not so sure where it’s going and how to justify that goal. The finale, which has three or four different endings, is a miasma of bewildering technique, misdirection, and intentionally chilling and gory-fuelled beats. It doesn’t undermine some of the broader insights of the penultimate episode, but it definitely overwhelms them.
The finale borders on invisibility because you won’t want to take your eyes off Weisz. The visual effects doubling the Oscar-winner are seamless, and so are her delineations between characters. Aided by the somewhat too obvious decision to have Beverly spend 90 percent of the show with her hair up and Elliot with her hair down, Weisz preserves the autonomy of both characters just as much as the show wants. As Elliot, she’s full of manic energy and gifted with a sizzling sense of dark humor, while Beverly’s internalized longing can be painful to watch. And if the properties of one merge into the properties of the other? Well, Dead Ringers would be worth pursuing for just the acting practice of anything.
Particularly in the early episodes, Rachel Weisz and Rachel Weisz are dynamic co-stars, easily helping the show disguise how thin some of the supporting characters and appearances are. I wish the series had more to do with Oldford, but it’s an effective embodiment of hope. I wish the show had more to do with Liu, but she can play some powerful notes in the finale.
A number of guest stars have a chance to become more memorable, including Susan Blommaert as a homeless woman with the soul of a Beat poet, Suzanne Bertish as the mother of the twins, and Ntare Guma Mbaho Mwine as a journalist who would be a plot device solely in lesser hands.
Whatever my frustrations with the Dead Ringers finale, it didn’t wipe away the provocative notes of the penultimate episode, and it left me with that feeling of simultaneous detachment and hypersensitivity to the outside world. It’s a feeling I often get from David Cronenberg films. This was appropriately similar but distinctive. Just like the series itself.