The twin gynecologists Elliot and Beverly Mantle (both played by Rachel Weisz) in “Dead Ringers,” Prime Video’s gender-flipped remake of David Cronenberg’s 1988 film, live together, work together, and woo together. Most of the time, it’s easy to tell who’s who. Beverly, the more modest and diligent of the two, tends to wear her shoulder-length hair in a bun as firm as her convictions, which one eye-rolling character sums up as “vomit-inducing idealism.” Everything about Elliot is looser, less controlled: her style, her appetites, her ethics, both personal and professional. Still, it’s a flustered Beverly who texts Elliot “SWAP” in the middle of a hospital shift, prompting the sisters to meet in a locker room, where they switch identities and set off to each other’s appointments. Elliot, an extroverted charmer who’s used to “getting” women for her shyer twin by posing as Beverly during the early stages of courtship, giddily texts about their latest patient, a TV actress named Genevieve (Britne Oldford): “beverlyyyyyyyyyyy she’s got the most extraordinary uterus.”
It’s an understatement to say that Cronenberg’s film, which starred Jeremy Irons in the lead roles, isn’t the most obvious candidate for a feminized reinterpretation. In Cronenberg’s version, the Mantles’ maleness is the point: Irons’s Beverly and “Ellie” are far more fascinated by female body parts than the women to which they belong. They deceive potential romantic partners by trading places, a sexual violation inextricably linked to the extreme paternalism they show their patients. (The remake slyly alludes to the unhingedness of the men in the original film by having a character ask the mother of a man named Marion, “Why did you give him a girl’s name? Were you hoping for pure fucking psycho from the cradle?”) Confronted by the possibility that a woman will drive them apart, Irons’s twins ultimately choose each other, even if their insularity leads them to a sordid end.
Alice Birch, the creator of the six-part TV miniseries, whose writing credits include “Succession” and “Normal People,” treats the movie less as a piece of source material than a prompt. (Like the film, the show also draws from the novel “Twins,” by Bari Wood and Jack Geasland, itself inspired by the true story of the identical ob-gyns Stewart and Cyril Marcus.) Moody and challenging, Birch’s “Dead Ringers” hews surprisingly close to many of Cronenberg’s story beats, but the remake is more thematically ambitious—and more consistently engaging. Birch aims for something far more difficult than her predecessor: a vision that melds the erotic and the clinical—not as the twisted world view of two eccentric doctors but as a normalization of women’s realities. As Elliot and Beverly make the rounds in the first episode, the show, which is graphic but not grisly, reminds us of the sights that pop culture tends to airbrush out of obstetric and gynecological scenes: stretch marks, pubic hair, C-sections, used tampons, the effluvia that coat newborns, the clumps of cells—nowhere near humanoid yet—ejected from the body during a miscarriage. (In an early scene, Beverly fishes hers out of the toilet bowl to inspect them after her latest pregnancy fails.) The presentation of these tableaux is simultaneously shocking and matter-of-fact and, I think, meant to startle us with the rarely represented ordinariness of how most of us come into the world. (I won’t blame anyone, though, for choosing something else to watch during their lunch hour.)
Genevieve isn’t the only woman that Elliot and Beverly pursue—a venture that the actress recognizes as “wildly inappropriate,” after Elliot offers to meet Genevieve at a bar following their appointment, but seductive nonetheless. The physicians, who are stars in their field (and British expatriates in America), also chase after a multimillion-dollar investment from a Sackler-esque heiress, Rebecca Parker (an exhilaratingly cunty Jennifer Ehle), to launch their own birthing center—a shining institution on a hill that they hope will change “the way women birth forever.” (At least that’s what Beverly intends; Elliot’s more interested in the opportunity to run a private research lab at the center, where she can make scientific headway unimpeded by disapproving bosses or regular government oversight.) This plotline allows Birch to expand on Cronenberg’s critique of medicine’s disservice to women. Here, the problem isn’t a pair of bad apples; rather, it’s a profit-driven system that caters to the whims of the wealthy while neglecting, at large, both mothers and babies, especially Black women and children. Rebecca and her wife (Emily Meade), who hails from something of an ob-gyn dynasty herself, agree to fund the Mantles’ center as long as it’s lucrative, which leads Elliot to attempt high-risk procedures in patients desperate enough to agree to them and experimental treatments that promise to, say, delay the onset of menopause for decades.
The birthing center resembles an airy, hospitable spaceship, boasting wood accents and few corners. In one of the clearest borrowings from Cronenberg’s visual larks, the center’s stark-white atrium and blood-red uniforms evoke menstrual iconography in equal parts camp and sophistication. The rest of the production design emphasizes circles and arches, creating a timeless, soft-lit Manhattan with yellow cabs and retrofuturistic pastels. (Estranged from their parents, the twins seldom speak of their childhoods in England, where their formative years were marked by their mother’s postpartum depression.) The series’ sense of dislocation is further amplified by the mysterious presence of the Mantles’ suspiciously chic housekeeper, Greta (Poppy Liu), who sports a collection of wigs and steals away organic detritus, often of the vaginal sort, from the apartment. (Not insignificantly, some of the show’s ickiest scenes come from the crossing of medical or bodily boundaries.) It’s a disappointment when this C plot becomes one of the few elements of the series that don’t pay off.
Is it strange that this “Dead Ringers” is so fun? Much of the show’s creepy pleasures comes from Weisz’s magnificent performance(s); it’s almost always clear when she’s playing Beverly or Elliot, and when she’s playing Beverly impersonating Elliot or Elliot passing herself off as Beverly. (Beverly’s smiles, for instance, are furrowed, whereas Elliot’s are feline.) Unlike Irons, Weisz also gets to be meanly funny, evidently relishing the scenes in which one or both of the sisters extravagantly humiliate smarmy men. Genevieve, a kinder update of the interloping figure, eventually becomes Beverly’s girlfriend, and is able to tell when she’s around Beverly, and when Elliot is pretending to be her sister. When Genevieve and Beverly decide to try for a baby of their own, a possessive Elliot starts to come undone, and her spiral is accelerated by drug use and a corresponding professional decline. Birch punctuates the series with (perhaps one too many) entropic, Altman-esque dinner-party scenes that double as forums of verbal gladiators and duelling insanities. A supper at Rebecca’s, in a satire of jet-set wellness, reveals a table full of trepanned skulls. The chaos from a different gathering finally forces a pregnant Beverly to choose between self-actualization and the Mantles’ warped allegiance of twindom.
Meanwhile, in an unknown time line, Beverly expresses relief at Elliot’s demise. Who’s the good twin, and who’s the bad one? One of the lingering images of the original film is the array of clawlike metal instruments that Beverly commissions to use on squirming patients. The new “Dead Ringers,” a lush bouquet of twists and provocations, often seeks its discomforts in more familiar places. After all, who needs Cronenbergian body horror when you’ve got the natural course of women’s bodies and intimate relationships? ♦
