dead ringers (season 1)

If you were to pick a David Cronenberg film to be remolded into a streaming series (insomuch as you’d reluctantly pick anything, given that Cronenberg is one of the most inimitable filmmakers of the past fifty years), you’d probably lean towards something like Scanners… what with its heads-exploding-like-rotten-pumpkins aesthetic and its high-concept mythology based around warring telekinetic factions, which at least provide a broad pulp canvas from which to work from. Unlikely to rank near the top (or even the middle) of the list would be Dead Ringers, Cronenberg’s cerebral, morgue slab-cold 1988 pic about identical twin gynecologists descending into madness… and yet, here we are.

It’s a dubious-at-best prospect that instantly became a lot more palatable once it was announced that Rachel Weisz would be playing the lead role… the Oscar winner’s pedigree speaks for itself, but this is also an instance in which gender reversal makes thrilling sense. Dead Ringers was about many things, but it definitely tapped into the squirmy terror of men being the dispassionate medical overlords of female anatomy (and everything it entails, physically and psychologically). The series takes a similar approach, minus Cronenberg’s operatic flair (his red surgical frocks were like something straight out of the Grand Guignol); it’s more subtle and insidious, the horror cloaked within a deceptive shroud of female empathy and protection. In this case, the vagina is more like a Venus flytrap. 

Weisz plays the Mantle twins, Beverly and Elliot, Manhattan-based wunderkinds of the OBGYN scene. Elliot is the extrovert, devoted to her sister and little else, her aura of smirking detachment like an impenetrable Teflon-coating. Beverly is more reserved, more maternal… driven by a fundamental idealism her more cynical twin lacks. It’s no surprise that Beverly is tasked with interfacing with the patients while Elliot is better suited to clinical research. As was the case in the movie, the duo have a delicate, deeply co-dependent balance that becomes dangerously destabilized when Beverly falls in love with an actress named Genevieve, played by Britne Oldford. Weisz, not surprisingly, is astonishing. Like Jeremy Irons, she inhabits the dual leads so completely, and is so consistent in her subtleties of body language, that the two characters remain fully distinguishable at all times (admittedly, Weisz benefits from stronger visual cues - such as Beverly typically wearing her hair up and Elliot wearing it down - but, as Irons did before her, she makes the challenge of acting opposite herself appear almost effortless). Not since Tatiana Maslany was performing the logistical equivalent of riding a unicycle across a tightrope while juggling milk bottles on Orphan Black has portraying twins been such a feat of actorly dexterity.   

The six-episode series follows the basic trajectory of the movie, with one significant change… Elliot and Beverly are still in the process of securing the financing to launch the private fertility clinic/birthing center they envision as their legacy. Jennifer Ehle (as you’d expect) is aces as Rebecca Parker, the daunting, Sackler-esque venture capitalist who thrives on the sort of cutthroat gamesmanship that’s like catnip to the combative Elliott and fingernails-on-a-chalkboard to the reticent Beverly. A sequence in which she hosts a dinner party for the twins to effectively sing for their supper is the series at its twisted and darkly comic apex… the verbal sparring like a storm of fencing rapiers furiously criss-crossing the table (dinner parties in general are seemingly the show’s bread-and-butter - equally memorable is Elliot and Beverly flying their parents in for a disastrous birthday celebration that keeps finding new emotional depths to plumb). One of the smartest things the new Dead Ringers does (though it’ll no doubt be a disappointment to some) is that it doesn’t even attempt to best Cronenberg at his own game… in other words, gynecology isn’t overtly utilized as a body horror battleground (the speculums, retractors and forceps evolving into literal instruments of alien terror). It traffics in a more muted, less deliriously weird - but no less potent - form of trauma.​

The female perspective keeps uncovering fresh angles and planes within the material. Beverly’s desire for a baby - and Elliot’s corresponding desire to concoct the perfect embryo for her - brings a maternal dimension to their bond that the film obviously wasn’t capable of (the presumptive co-parenting of said child is just one of the many reasons Genevieve’s disruptive presence feels so ominous; she threatens not only the relationship between the twins, but their familial potential). Not everything in the series works. The subplot concerning Poppy Liu as the Mantles’ housekeeper dovetails thematically (after some ample head-scratching), but there’s an artificiality to it - Liu drifts through scenes on a compartmentalized wavelength. And the ending wobbles undeniably, though it’s hard not to appreciate the sheer brazenness of its narrative cheek. Weisz is the reason to watch, however. There’s no guarantee - given the cluttered streaming landscape, in which content largely passes, ghost-like, into the ether - that she’ll garner the Emmy recognition she so richly deserves, but this is undoubtedly one of the past year’s best performances. She’s diabolically good. Diabolical, methodical and fundamentally gynecological.