SPOILER WARNING:

Dead Ringers was released on April 21st as a drama mini-series available for streaming on Amazon Prime. But this series is inspired by the king of venereal or body horror himself, David Cronenberg. More specifically, his 1988 masterpiece of the same name. The film stars the ever-talented Jeremy Irons whose performance is so outstanding, you continually question the idea that he’s not a twin.  

Dead Ringers is about twins Elliot and Beverly who work in a gynecological office. They live their lives intensely similarly and go as far as pretending to be each other to sleep with the same women. This causes a strain on their relationships with those around them who don’t understand their bond, leading them to their ultimate demise. 

Watching this film left me continually surprised for a multitude of reasons (not just because I came in thinking I was watching another Cronenberg classic, Scanners). Off the bat, Dead Ringers lacked a lot of gore, which was only shocking because of who Cronenberg is usually built up to be (Watch The Fly for an easier introduction to his gore). The film, at most, only had two scenes that showed even a glimmer of blood, the ending, being the most intense, was only really pictured from a distance. But I truly believe this is purposeful. The writing of Dead Ringers is supposed to make you feel intensely comfortable, and I feel as though Cronenberg was leaning into the horror relying on the sheer terrifying nature of the relationship between Elliot and Beverly to scare you. It also leaves you on the edge of your seat which is a brilliant writing tactic, and genius if you think about it really. Because of this, the writing is intensely strong and manages to make the uncomfortable plot somehow poetic and even gorgeous. Purely on the co-dependency aspect, and the fact they pretend to be each other, you constantly find yourself confused as to who’s who, but I think this is completely purposeful. We as the audience question their identities because they question them as well. Being so combined with someone, mind, body, and soul, with the combination of taking the other’s name every so often, they’ve almost fused and become one. And rather than the identity crisis happening between the characters, it happens within the audience, which is an incredibly fascinating thing. We become so immersed with the characters that it’s also like we become a triplet in their unsettling relationship. You’re torn, confused. You’re uncomfortable. 

This film is most definitely a slow burn, (which can be boring for some people) really just following the lives of these two characters. While side characters like Claire come in and try to disrupt their lives, I believe that the usual logline that you see for the film (which usually reads as something like: A set of twins work as gynecologists and navigate their odd lives and relationship together until a woman sends them to shambles), is completely untrue. When you describe the film like this, Claire is set up as the antagonist, and the main factor for their descent into insanity (specifically Beverly’s), but there are actually multiple contributing factors to their breaking down, and the big one is actually themselves. They are their biggest antagonist, they are their own self-destructors. Their necessity to be one and the same affects their relationships with everyone else around them, isolating themselves to only rely on each other. But this isn’t an issue, because that’s exactly what they want. Eli and Bev against the world. And this is why the ending works so well. While Beverly becomes the crazier one, we see just how much it affects his brother, I mean it physically and emotionally just gnaws away at him. So it does make complete sense for Eli to go along with it. If anything he needed to be the one more “out of it” just to simply take the pain of seeing his brother in such a horrible state. The tragicness of Eli being the one who dies, in the end, is the perfect ending, because he wasn’t the one who was struggling in the first place, it was the sheer torment that drove him to that. It’s their need to be identical that brought them to the end. Additionally, Eli was always the one who put pressure on doing the exact same things, which is funny because he also always seemed more independent. But there is definitely this air that underneath the “stronger” persona he puts on, he needs his brother way more than Bev needs him. The ending shot is gorgeous, leans biblical even. It reminds you one of those Renaissance paintings that depict one of those important events from the bible. And the tie-in to: “Chang died of a stroke in the middle of the night, when Eng woke up he died of fright” was absolutely genius, as we see these two bare bodies, sitting up straight, close, almost one, as they always wished to be. 

In closing thoughts for this film, something I’m still pondering is why they have women’s nicknames. I really do believe that it's for a specific purpose because even side characters in the film make jokes about it, but that’s something that will reveal itself with age. Overall, Dead Ringers had me constantly in awe of its poetic beauty, and fully enamored with its metaphors.