When I heard someone had the gall to remake David Cronenberg's classic 1988 body horror film "Dead Ringers", I was angry. But now that the remake is out, I have to confess I am both surprised and delighted with the results.
The Amazon Studios series "Dead Ringers" is inspired by both Cronenberg’s film and the 1977 book "Twins" by Bari Wood and Jack Geasland. The book was taken from the true story of twin brothers Stewart and Cyril Marcus, gynecologists found dead together under mysterious circumstances in Cyril’s Manhattan apartment in 1975.
Origins of the story
It is easy to see how the real life story would have stirred interest. Twins have their own certain inherent draw. Add to that the layer of prominence of two doctors on the staff of a respected New York hospital who seemed to have been drug addicts while still operating on patients. Then they're found dead together. It's almost irresistible as the seeds for a story.
Cronenberg was only interested in the core idea — the intensely close relationship of twin brothers. Then he put his unique stamp on it. He turned attention inward to deliver an intensely insular tale of Elliot and Beverly Mantle (played by Jeremy Irons), identical twin gynecologists running a practice in Toronto. The film centers almost entirely on the brothers with Genevieve Bujold's character appearing to upset the balance of the twins but not really getting much screen time.
Cronenberg references the famous real-life Siamese twins Chang and Eng because although Beverly and Elliot are not physically attached, their psychological connection proves an even more intimate and ultimately life-threatening bond. Cronenberg emphasizes the similarity of the twins, barely giving us any visual cues to differentiate them. So we sometimes find ourselves wondering who is who.
Giving the story a gender flip
Actress Rachel Weisz was also a fan of Cronenberg’s "Dead Ringers." Her attraction to it stemmed from an actor's desire for a meaty role, or in this case, roles. So she suggested a gender swap.
“At first it was just a practical decision, in that, I thought it would be interesting to play sisters,” Weisz said. “Then I thought about twins and the codependent twins in this story. So the short answer is, so I could play them and then it evolved from there.”
Weisz then tapped showrunner Alice Birch, who worked on the series "Succession", and has written a pair of powerful Florence Pugh films, "Lady Macbeth" and "The Wonder". The result is a show that does exactly what a remake should do — be a bold reimagining that reveals a new perspective on familiar material.
First of all, the Mantle twins are now female obstetricians as well as gynecologists with Beverly dedicated to creating a new kind of birthing center for women and Elliot focused on radical and potentially unethical research in the area of treating infertility. They are readily distinguishable. Beverly, with her hair tightly pulled back, is more introverted and empathetic while Elliot, with her hair down and a ravenous appetite for everything, is more extroverted and confrontational.
Playing the dual roles provided Weisz with the kind of challenge actors love to sink their teeth into.
"The characters were written on the page with such psychological complexity and depth and humanness," Weisz said. "They were flawed and brilliant and dysfunctional, and they were both completely different to the other, and yet totally dependent on the other. So it was very rich food and brilliant writing for my imagination."
So the twins are still intricately bound together but with an added tension of contrasting personalities tugging at that bond.
Birch credits Weisz as the catalyst for this reimagining of Cronenberg’s film.
“I hadn't seen the film before," Birch confessed. "So, watched it, watched it again, thought it was incredible and there's so much about the tone that's so interesting, and it looks so amazing, and there was lots that I felt we could really steal from. But really it's this central relationship, these twins, the most intense, unhealthy, but also beautiful relationship at the center of it that I felt like, okay, I think we could get six hours of television out of that.”
The show steals just the right amount from Cronenberg's film to pay homage to the original but with enough fresh angles to make it a completely different entity. But there is an obvious appreciation for the groundwork Cronenberg laid.
The show, with the luxury of six hours to develop a story, gets to explore issues outside of just the intense relationship of the twins. It places them in the real world and the larger context of having to work within a medical profession designed mostly by men, and having to pitch wealthy, profit-driven investors to create a new birthing and research center. This broader context allows the series to tackle ideas about women’s health and challenge how we perceive those issues. On a certain level, it finds a new kind of horror in what the Mantle twins face in challenging the status quo.
A new kind of body horror
Beverly likes to point out that "pregnancy is not a disease." So on one level the show comes off as a feminist challenge to ideas about women's health.
Cronenberg's film culminates with Beverly designing and commissioning a set of “Instruments for Operating on Mutant Women," bizarre, phallic, and ominously biomechanical tools (think H.R. Giger) that frighten and hurt his patients. Beverly is quick to dismiss complaints by saying, “there’s nothing the matter with the instrument… it’s the women’s bodies that are all wrong".
The gender flip of the new "Dead Ringers" gives the body horror a completely new and different take. And that’s the mark of a good remake.
The show presents women’s bodies – pregnant, giving birth, cut open for C-sections – in graphic ways that create a sense of body horror simply because they are making visible what we usually don’t see on TV or even in movies. And that can make people uncomfortable.
"As soon as we knew that (the Mantles) would work in obstetrics, then I think we knew that we were going to be depicting childbirth," Birch said. "And it was just about what was interesting to us. I've never really seen that on screen, and so I felt interested. We see violence all the time. We see death all the time on screen. It’s how we all arrived into the world and we never, ever see it. And I find that very interesting."
But the film moves from showing women's bodies as life giving to something more sinister. First, we see Elliot's work in the laboratory to create life in a test tube and fetuses growing outside of the womb. It is clandestine work that society has deemed unethical and Elliot's success endows her with an arrogance that starts to slip into sci-fi horror.
“They're both so brilliant and amazing at their jobs. And I think Elliot, that was such a lot of fun to kind of be able to follow her imagination and sort of do the research and hear about some of the amazing scientific things that people are working on in the real world and then kind of push them as far as we could,” Birch said.
And the show does love to push things. Perhaps the most horrific scene is one in which we are not shown anything but are told something. The Mantles are introduced to a beloved Southern doctor who is presented as a champion of women's health. Dr. Marion James is played by the immensely likable Michael McKean (of "This is Spinal Tap" and TV's "Laverne and Shirley") but then he casually recounts a story about an ancestor who "partnered" with a patient to discover new means of surgery for women.
The episode, directed by the talented Karyn Kusama, draws on historical fact. Dr. Marion James takes his name from Dr. James Marion Sims, credited as the "father of modern gynecology." Sims developed pioneering tools and surgical techniques for women’s reproductive health but his research was conducted on enslaved Black women without anesthesia (a racist thought at the time was that the Black women did not feel pain the way white women did).
The episode never shows the surgery but has Dr. James describe it in a very matter of fact manner that makes the woman seem a willing participant. He sees absolutely nothing wrong with how the medical advances were achieved. The end justifies the means.
But later in the episode, Beverly imagines seeing a young Black woman who repeats the story with an emphasis on how a 17-year-old enslaved Black woman "was operated on 30 times without anesthesia." And we know nothing about her aside from what the white man who experimented and tortured her wrote. From then on, the body horror takes on a very vivid and angry tone as we are made aware of history that may not be widely known.
That episode just shows the many layers of body horror the show explores.
Acting with yourself
While I was impressed with the thematic approach to the material and the particular horror that engendered, the show is also technically brilliant. Weisz performs scenes with herself in an intensely personal and interactive way, yet you completely forget it's just a visual trick.
“And then there was just the physical production reality of performing the twins, which was hair, makeup, costume," Weisz said. "And whilst I was doing that, the whole crew changed around readiness for the other twin’s lighting, VFX, props, set, dressing, camera. The whole production did a swap. So I was supported first by the writing and then by the crew. And we got better and better at it as time went on. At the beginning, it was like a foal learning to walk, and by the end we were galloping through it. Fifteen minutes into the change. And, yeah, it was a really challenging but really joyous group activity.”
The show sucks us into the world of the Mantle twins, first in a sort of jaunty, playful, energetic way and then with darker psychological underpinnings that reveal the twins on a downward spiral.
“We begin in a place that's really grounded and recognizable,” Birch said. “Then we end up in somewhere that's really quite heightened and strange and operatic. People are doing things that I think had we started in that place, it would have felt far-fetched but hopefully the time that we had means that we can get there in a way that feels kind of natural.”
While I can quibble over a few plot points, this new "Dead Ringers" is overall riveting and well executed. Sean Durkin (who solo directed episodes One and Two) co-directs the final episode (I hope the final!) with Lauren Wolkstein and it is at the end that the series hits the narrowing psychological world of the twins that so fascinated Cronenberg. The episode feels trapped in Beverly's head as we hear a constant ringing of her cell phone and hear Elliot's voice like a mantra saying "baby sister." It creates a soundscape that gets us into Beverly's head and builds tension in a brilliant way.
All six episodes of the new "Dead Ringers" series are currently available exclusively on Prime Video. It was created, written, and executive produced by Birch.
