While there\u2019s a certain trendiness to the gender-swapping of the lead characters, it\u2019s a fertile time to explore what Washington Post<\/em> reviewer Rita Kempley called \u201cevery woman\u2019s nightmare\u201d \u2013 that the physician examining and evaluating the most private parts of your anatomy might be deceiving you \u2013 from a female perspective. Cronenberg, of course, has never shied away from the grotesque potentials of the human form, but Dead Ringers<\/em> feels unique in his filmography for its thoughtful melding of body horror and character study. It is, in many ways, his most mature and intimate work. <\/p>\n\n\n\n A lot of this can be attributed to Jeremy Irons, who plays Beverly and Elliot Mantle with a seamlessness that often feels like a magic trick happening before our eyes. Rather than cuing the audience with identifiable haircuts or clothing, Irons employs an array of subtle mannerisms and verbal tics to let us know which brother we\u2019re looking at: the more socially adept and cynical Ellie or the shier, more sensitive Bev. Even then, it\u2019s not always obvious, something the Mantle twins use to their advantage. Ellie is \u201cthe face\u201d of their practice, accepting the awards and gladhanding the donors. Bev does the research and handles the patients. When needed, they sub in for one another during appointments. As we soon discover, they do this with their sexual conquests too, a game of brinkmanship where the brothers are as much one another\u2019s pawns as the women Ellie seduces before handing them over to Bev.<\/p>\n\n\n\n This theoretical attitude towards sex dates back to their childhood. In the film\u2019s mordantly funny opening scene, the nine-year-old twins discuss Elliot\u2019s discovery that humans don\u2019t fertilize eggs like fish do because they don\u2019t live underwater. They approach a neighborhood girl to ask if she\u2019ll have sex with them in their bathtub as an experiment; she promptly tells them to fuck off. \u201cThey\u2019re so different from us,\u201d Elliot muses, a statement that will become the guiding philosophy behind their entire careers. Almost as soon as we\u2019ve met them they become leaders in their field, but for all they\u2019ve learned about the internal mechanics of reproductive organs from diagrams, there are certain emotional elements to copulation that remain elusive to the Mantles. <\/p>\n\n\n\n Like most of their conquests she begins as a patient. She first draws Ellie\u2019s interest because she\u2019s an actress; she draws Bev\u2019s because she has a \u201ctrifurcated\u201d cervix. It means she likely can\u2019t have the children she desperately wants; instead, she gets the Mantle boys. The way Cronenberg stages Bev and Claire\u2019s trysts has a distinctly maternal vibe. Bev often ends up clutching her by the waist, leaning his head against her stomach. She comforts him after nightmares and feeds him pills like candy. But Ellie\u2019s parasitical relationship with his brother can\u2019t accommodate such an attachment, and soon enough the three are barrelling towards inevitable tragedy. <\/p>\n\n\n\n The Mantles are hardly the first of Cronenberg\u2019s characters to exhibit what psychologists would call a \u201cGod complex,\u201d but there is something disturbingly pure in their pursuit of it. What else would drive men to seek dominion over the life-giving power of the uterus but a need to control what they don\u2019t understand, and could never possess? Late in the film, Bev is dressed by attendees in the blood red medical gown worn in the operating theater, lifting his arms so he looks \u201cmore like a cultic high priest than a modern man of science,\u201d as Helen W. Robbins writes in her essay \u201cMore Human Than I Am Alone.\u201d <\/p>\n\n\n\n Such megalomania will be fruitful territory for the miniseries to explore in a post-Roe world, but in the end the Mantle brothers are less interested in fusing with the feminine than with one another. While the Marcus corpses were found in separate rooms, Cronenberg closes his film with a much more indelible image: the twins curled fetally against one another, creating in death the womb they\u2019ve spent their whole lives seeking. It will be a tough act to follow.<\/p>\n\n\n\n “Dead Ringers” is streaming on HBO Max<\/a> and Peacock<\/a>. <\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n![\"\"](\"https:\/\/crookedmarquee.com\/stage8\/wp-content\/uploads\/2023\/04\/dead-ringers21-1024x576.jpg\")
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At least until they meet Claire (played by a spiky Genevieve Bujold), who upsets the balance between the brothers, so carefully maintained that Ellie speaks of their need to \u201csynchronize,\u201d like watches. As with much of Cronenberg\u2019s oeuvre, there is a gaping hole at the center of this story, though this one is figurative rather than literal. There is something immaculate about the Mantle\u2019s existence, and I don\u2019t just mean the gleaming interiors of their shared apartment. They appear to subsist entirely on each other. Though they obviously had a father and mother at some point, neither is ever mentioned or seen. It\u2019s a familial absence that Claire will soon fill, at least for one of them. <\/p>\n\n\n\n