Dead Ringers

If you like the David Cronenberg of Crash (1996) and Naked Lunch (1991) then Dead Ringers will be a film for you as it manifest the director’s creepily morbid fascination with human viscera and body fluids on the one hand, emotional alienation and self loathing on the other.

Jeremy Irons plays Beverly and Elliot Mantle, identical twins and celebrated gynecologists. Eliot is suave but calculating, Beverly less sure of himself is dominated by his brother. Nevertheless they pretend to be each other particularly when it suits the purposes of the sexually predatory Elliot. The film concerns itself with one such episode when Elliot, tiring of an actress patient (Genevieve Bujold) who has three openings to her uterus handballs her to Beverly who falls in love with her. He does not tell her about the deception but it eats away at him and gradually, helped by the drugs she shares with him, the intimate relationship with his brother disintegrates and Beverly becomes increasingly unhinged. If you think this sounds unappealing wait until Beverly starts using custom surgical instruments that look like relics from the Grand Inquisition.

What on earth attracts Cronenberg to such materials eludes me. Although the identical twin device could have served as an effective metaphor for the divided self the film doesn’t really engage with the phenomenon or its particular manifestation in any psychologically realistic way. Instead Cronenberg frames the familiar tropes of the relationship with a coldly clinical approach that is borne out by the chilly production design and Irons’s commanding performance in the lead.

Irons does a first-class job in skillfully differentiating the brothers and the transformation that takes place in them and their relationship over the course of the film whilst Peter Suschitzky’s cinematography integrates Irons’s dual role seamlessly. Bujold, who was prominent film actress in the 1970s and ‘80s but little heard of thereafter is adequate but in a limited role does not bring much to the film beyond that.

All up Dead Ringers is niche viewing for the Cronenberg faithful.

 

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