LONDON: Perhaps the best compliment you can pay a show wherein the same actor plays two roles, is if you forget there aren’t actually twins on screen. And so it is with Prime Video’s “Dead Ringers” in which Rachel Weisz plays Beverly and Elliot Mantle, a pair of supremely gifted gynecologists whose ambition for revolutionizing the medical industry is matched only by the scale of their questionable lifestyle choices.
Rachel Weisz plays Beverly and Elliot Mantle. (Supplied)
Beverly is the more empathetic of the two, and dreams of helping women to change the way they feel about pregnancy and birth. Elliot is the more brash twin, happier in the lab where she can challenge the boundaries of medical ethics, and prone to more hedonistic outbursts during her time off. When they are offered the backing of a chillingly forthright billionaire investor (played by Jennifer Ehle), the twins suddenly have all the backing they could ever want, and the means with which to pursue their own particular agendas.
‘Dead Ringers’ is directed by David Cronenberg. (Supplied)
Those hoping for a simple retread of David Cronenberg’s 1988 psychological thriller will be disappointed — the 2023 version is far more than a gender-switched carbon copy with a few visual throwbacks for good measure. This “Dead Ringers” has six episodes to play with, too, so there’s time for some deadly skewering of societal and class divides, scope to critique the US healthcare system, and time to attack the very nature of viewing pregnancy as an illness, and birthing centers as hospitals. The show is less brazenly shocking in terms of body horror than Cronenberg’s movie — though, viewers beware, it still has some pretty graphic moments — and altogether more cerebrally visceral as a result.
And atop all of that is Weisz, turning in a staggeringly powerful double performance as the twins, delivering on both fronts without resorting to cheap, throwaway stereotypes. Both Beverly and Elliot are packed with nuance — it’s sometimes grotesque nuance, but its nuance all the same. It would be simple to hang a story like this on visual similarities, or simply ‘twins swapping lives,’ but “Dead Ringers” is a far more complex, convoluted, thoughtful and shocking experience — and all the better for it.
