Dead Ringers: A Splashy Gender-Flipping Franken-series Version of Cronenberg’s Horror Classic
By Liam Lacey
Rating: B
Ultimately more interesting for its ideas than compelling as drama, the splashy and expensive-looking new Prime Video eight-part series, Dead Ringers, is a gender-switching adaptation of David Cronenberg's 1988 surreal psychodrama of the same name.
The original starred Jeremy Irons as identical twin gynecologists, in a story inspired by the true-life tale of New York doctors, Stewart and Cyril Marcus. The series is overseen by British playwright and in-demand screenwriter, Alice Birch, who was hired to refashion Cronenberg’s film with a female lead.
Rachel Weisz (Oscar winner for The Constant Gardener) stars in the double role of the Mantle siblings, bold Elliot and reserved, sensitive, Beverly.
Rachel Weisz as twin gynaecologists in the series reboot of Dead Ringers.
The script keeps the same names as the Cronenberg film, and some visual cues (the doctor’s red scrubs) but the female Elliot and Beverly’s duties have expanded to include both gynecology and obstetrics. This means, particularly in the first episode, scenes involving the delivery of babies, by Caesarian and vaginal delivery, with swollen bellies and labour screams and bloody sheets to remind us, as one character puts it, that birth is a“violent” business.
As in the original film, there’s a love triangle when Beverly falls in love with a famous actress, named Geneviève (Britne Oldford), a role played by Geneviève Bujold in the Cronenberg film. The love affair leaves Elliot, who has been trying to impregnate her sister via in vitro insemination, shut off from her.
That emotional rupture sets in motion her downward spiral. The second episode foreshadows the conclusion, when one of the sisters appears at a grief counseling group for her sibling.
The new series, though set in contemporary Manhattan, has traces of the original movie’s late ‘80s time frame: Lots of people smoke and casually whip out cocaine at parties. But they also have, sparingly, access to smart phones.
The soundtrack is heavy on ‘80s BritPop (Eurythmics, Human League, Joy Division). But there are also references to “AR and VR” (augmented and virtual reality). And locally sourced kambucha drinks suggest a kind of present-retro-futurism mashup.
The Cronenberg film, shot mostly in clinically cool interiors, took us on a journey from cool restraint to madness, with the themes of mind-body duality and gender-roles subsumed into the experiential vortex of the story.
Birch’s series stands separately as a kind of thought experiment, an explicitly didactic series of riffs on the same themes from a women’s perspective. The result is a compendium of reproduction-related scenes and ideas, including sometimes barely integrated subplots along with blasts of satire and gothic pastiche.
Elliot (the bad, bold sister) spits out lines that suggest Kieran Culkin’s snarky jibes or Logan Roy’s rants in Succession (a show Birch has written for). But too often the dialogue strains at caustic rudeness, so full of F-bombs (and characters’ commentary on the use of the word), that Birch and her writing team highlight the aggressive expletive, reminding you that copulation leads to babies.
That will remain the case until we can grow bespoke children in test-tubes and incubators, which is one of the subplots of the film.
Also, Dead Ringers redux is about feminist-lensed history (Birch also wrote two Florence Pugh historical films, Lady Macbeth and The Wonder, as well as adapting the Sally Rooney novels, Normal People and Conversations with Friends, and especially the urgently topical subject of women’s reproductive health care.
Beverly (the good timid one) wants to establish a birthing clinic that will change giving birth forever for the better, because the “diabolical” health system “bullies and scares and terrorizes and humiliates and rushes and ruins women and their bodies.” Bad Elliot, on the other hand, wants to use it as a research facility to make a lot of money, delay menopause, make “bespoke” children, and work as a surrogacy factory for the wealthy.
Weisz will, no doubt, receive high praise for her double role, because it’s the sort of work that takes obvious effort. And while Weisz pulls it off well, the acting’s not subtle. Both of Weisz’s characters tend to extremes and it’s never hard to tell them apart: The reserved Beverly pulls her hair back primly while Elliot lets her hair, like her conversation, flow freely.
The problem is Elliot seems so aggressively inappropriate and manic from the start, her psychological trip to the dark side seem like a short hop.
The writing works in fits and starts, with dialogue full of rhetorical flights and plot points that contain archly Shakespearian flourishes: There’s a truth-telling hyper-literate homeless woman, an Ariel-like Asian-American artist-maid, Greta, and even a ghost/dream visitation on a foggy landscape.
Over the series, there are two big Buñuel-esque surreal dinner sequences, that do a lot of didactic heavy-lifting: One involves a couple of amoral Sackler-like billionaire investors (Jennifer Ehle and Emily Meade), the other is presided over by a rich Alabama doctor (Michael McKean with a honey-dripping accent), who’s purpose is to remind us of the gruesome racist history of modern gynecology.
As a whole, this is a Frankenstein of a series, an assemblage of spare parts including homage, melodrama, and didactic messaging, with enough flowing blood to remind you of its body horror source material.
In fact, the original Frankenstein novel is the series’ legitimate ancestor: The first medical horror story, from a young woman, Mary Shelley, written a year after losing a baby in childbirth, in what has increasingly interpreted as a feminist allegory of a doctor arrogant enough to believe he can create new life without the involvement of a woman.
Dead Ringers; Starring: Rachel Weisz, Britne Oldford, Poppy Liu, Michael Chernus Jennifer Ehle, Emily Meade and Michael McKean. Created by Alice Birch, based on David Cronenberg’s film, Dead Ringers. Directed by Sean Durkin, Sean Durkin, Karyn Kusama, Lauren Wolkstein, and Karena Evans.