Weisz shines twice in gender-swapped ‘Dead Ringers’
Fans of Canadian filmmaker David Cronenberg’s 1988 film “Dead Ringers” – starring Jeremy Irons in the dual role of Elliot and Beverly Mantle, identical twin gynecologists with a fondness for drugs, a willingness to manipulate their patients into having sex with them, and a radical vision for the future of women’s reproductive medicine – are doubtless already aware of Amazon Prime’s new limited series adaptation, which dropped on April 21.
Many of them, if not most, have probably already seen all six episodes. For anyone else, however, it might feel like a perfectly reasonable question to ask why anyone might be drawn to a story with a premise as twisted, dark, and deeply disquieting as this one – but of course, those are the very things that make it irresistible.
The original “Dead Ringers” – which Cronenberg and screenwriter Norman Snider adapted from a novel (“Twins”) by Bari Wood and Jack Geasland – is considered a masterpiece of “body horror,” a sub-genre that plays on our instinctive fear of mutilation, deformity, or other such intrusive desecrations of our physical beings.
It’s a brooding story of co-dependence and isolation, with Irons delivering two distinctively different but equally disturbing flavors of narcissistic amorality as the two brothers spiral away from the outside world into the private reality they’ve built around their obsessions and the unique advantages that come with being identical twins.
