“It’s impossible to explain this relationship to anyone outside of it,” says Beverly (or possibly Elliot) Mantle, one-half of the identical twins played by Rachel Weisz at the center of Dead Ringers. “We don’t need anyone else. We never have.” The sisters’ completely entwined and ostensibly self-sufficient ecosystem powers Amazon’s adaptation of David Cronenberg’s 1988 cult classic of the same name.
We meet the Mantles in an austere world of bodies, babies, and blood. The twins are both brilliant and successful obstetricians, working side by side in an uptown New York City hospital. They represent two sides of a coin: Beverly, who does most of the baby-delivering, is quiet and orderly, while Elliot, who studies fertility issues in the lab, is brash and reckless. They share a goal of opening their own birthing center—a place where they can call the shots, oversee their own research, and curate an environment that will “change the way women give birth.”
Dead Ringers offers plenty of visceral evidence—rivers of blood on linoleum, guttural screams, thrashing pregnant bodies strapped to machines—to support the Mantle sisters’ desire for change. The sisters dream of something more earthy, instinctual, and humane than the sterile hospital halls within which patients are too often dismissed, humiliated, and sometimes killed, along with their babies. “Despite the fact that this is how every single one of us enters the world,” preaches Beverly—who’s trying to get pregnant and struggling with recurrent miscarriages—“this is the best that we have come up with.”
For all the Mantles’ genius and frank idealism, though, they’re fueled by an underlying chaos. Their decision-making is often hasty and heedless. They sleep with their patients. Elliot has a cocaine habit, and her lab is up to something radical and probably illegal. To the twins, medical and interpersonal ethics seem generally tedious, an impediment to progress, and certainly less important than the achievability of their larger goal.
In the company of each of Weisz’s impressively distinct and fully realized sisters, we can’t help but feel a sense of impending implosion. It only takes a few novel variables to bring their dysfunction to the surface. First, a young actress and one-time patient, Genevieve (Britne Oldford), shows a lot of interest in Beverly—and none in Elliot, who seems nearly physically incapable of dealing with that. “It’s not your business,” Beverly says to her sister about her budding relationship. “Everything’s my fucking business,” Elliot spits back.
Soon after, the Parkers, a wealthy pharmaceutical family headed by the callous Rebecca (Jennifer Ehle) offer to fund the twins’ birthing center. The Parkers are decidedly less interested in providing safe environments for mothers and their babies than they are in the potential profits of Elliot’s research (which includes menopause delayed indefinitely, fetuses gestated in artificial wombs). And their offer comes with serious conditions.
As things begin to devolve, it isn’t gray-area patient ethics or vision-compromising billionaires that prove the greatest liability for the Mantles. It’s their own closeness. Not only do they share an apartment and spend most of their waking and sleeping hours together, they have never in their lives been in separate cities (the threat of even a weekend apart produces tremendous tension). And they think nothing of swapping places on unsuspecting patients and romantic interests; a hair tie and some lip gloss, which they trade with practiced ease, do the trick.
Cronenberg’s version of this story is a psychosexual horror film about two-ness. Its male protagonists (played by Jeremy Irons) shared everything, including sexual partners and a contempt for women in general. This gender-inverted adaptation offers a welcome, if sometimes unsubtle, twist with its social commentary about maternal health and bodily autonomy. It also adds a few tonally inharmonious moments of outright social satire, particularly where the Parkers and their heinous extended network are concerned.
But the biggest strength of this Dead Ringers, like its predecessor’s, is its stylish sense of dread. As in Cronenberg’s visually striking film, blood-red hospital scrubs provide an aesthetic clue that something is unwell and unsustainable. Reality and surreality uneasily coexist. The constant buzzing of a cellphone throughout much of one episode, muffled as though in a bag under a table, produces an incredible paranoia in one of the characters—and, by extension, the audience, insofar as you, too, might think that you’re hearing things.
In a satisfying externalization of the entwined fates of the sisters, two-ness is visually front and center in this Dead Ringers, from the neat pairs of pomegranates on Mantles’ kitchen counter to the perfectly bifurcated window panes at the hospital. Extreme camera angles, sometimes fully upside-down, cause the world to briefly appear like a mirror image of our own. And, as Elliot works in her lab to fix her patients’ fertility problems, we’re frequently shown the bisecting of an egg cell in mitosis under a microscope. This embodies the best of the brutal logic at the center of Dead Ringers: Even within the process of making life—of creating—there’s both a miraculous doubling and a necessary cleaving in half.
Since 2001, we've brought you uncompromising, candid takes on the world of film, music, television, video games, theater, and more. Independently owned and operated publications like Slant have been hit hard in recent years, but we’re committed to keeping our content free and accessible—meaning no paywalls or fees.
If you like what we do, please consider subscribing to our Patreon or making a donation.
