2 out of 5

Created by: Alice Birch (developed by)

covers season 1

Dead Ringers is, admittedly, my favorite Cronenberg film, but I also haven’t watched it in at least a decade, and it’s not a flick I can quote from, or even vividly recall any particular scene from it; I went through my Cronenberg phase, and that was the movie that affected me the most.

But as a cloud of ambivalence hung over my viewing of the 2023 TV adaptation of the movie / book, growing darker and weightier from scene to scene, I kept wondering: am I being some pre-judgey fanboy? Am I not giving the show a fair shot? Or maybe… it just doesn’t work?

So let’s approach this – as we should – as its own work.

In Dead Ringers (2023), Elliot and Beverly Mantle are identical twins and gynecologists, both played by Rachel Weisz. Elliot is the more dominant and clinical of the pair; Beverly is more submissive and caring. In their practice and personal lives, this plays out as a more brusque bedside manner and more indulgences – food, drugs, sex – for Elliot, while Bev tends to want to engage with her patients more, and has a more selective manner regarding all the “extras.” But the duo are bound by their nature, and it’s clear that Elliot will step in to help her sister in various ways, with the duo literally pretending to be one another (done via mannerisms, and the more obvious method of putting hair down or up, as is Elliot’s / Beverly’s wont, respectively) if it means that El can save Bev from some stress or shame, or use her directness to help her sister get something she wants.

Such as: Beverly’s current dream project of a bespoke birthing center. As is stated several times, pregnancy is not a disease, and yet Beverly (and by extension Elliot) view the current treatment of expecting mothers as essentially classifying it that way, imbuing the process with a fearfulness and stigma that goes against how natural of a thing it is. Bev is seeking funding for a facility that will completely cater to each mother individually, and getting that funding means going to an unscrupulous – but rich – source: the Sackler-esque opioid hustler Rebecca Parker (Jennifer Ehle). Meanwhile, Elliot has also taken the first couple steps to interest TV star Genevieve (Britne Oldford) in Beverly, as the latter has had quite a crush on the former. And when Genevieve and Bev move beyond a fling, it throws things into disarray.

Bev / El have a rather codependent relationship, with Bev relying on El for rescue in all these scenarios, but El also feeding off of that need. This is challenged by Genevieve, but their divide in desires somewhat grows as well – the birthing center is in progress, and El is talking up some illegal future science stuff – cloning, biohacking – and appealing to funder Parker’s dollar-sign motivation, while Bev is just trying to keep it focused on the mothers. A rift between the two grows…

Rachel Weisz is, or can be, a great actors. And we can look at this role – playing your own twin – as one of those dream parts that really allows an actor to get in there and strut their stuff. So I think it’s only natural to assume that a good actor is going to do a good job at that. But Weisz’s performance is where I first felt alarm bells, as her approach here unfortunately feels like a fairly cartoonish representation: where Elliot swears a lot and is very crass, and Beverly blushes at those swears and speaks in a whisper. Neither character ever like a whole person – just designed-on-paper quirks – but nor do they add up to a very compelling whole, if we’re trying to read into the twins as two sides of a single human.

It’s not wholly on Weisz to carry this, of course, as the script has to provide El and Bev with things to say, and that’s where we get into the other large knock: that this is a show of talking points, and not much focus. The central issues of bodily autonomy, and the male POV that’s led the medical practice in relation to women, are very much timely (probably always, unfortunately), and conceptually well wedded to the reliance on each other the twins have, as well as their own skewed ways of seeing things. But in practice, this often amounts to just spitting out rhetoric – the show actually lampshades this at one point, repeating Bev’s “pregnancy is not a disease” line back to her, and questioning what that means, and stacking up thematic parallels but not pushing the conversation forward at all. It’s a grand ol’ time to poke fun at rich, corporate types, which is also baked into the treatment of the Parker character, it just doesn’t amount to anything beyond that – it’s shallow commentary, just saying the thing out loud and leaving it at that. And so when Dead Ringers tries combining that with psychological thrills – the tensions and ties between the twins – it further clouds whatever the show is trying to do, as it wants to play with the identity crisis and body horror of the original movie, but also speak to a very specific issue – how we view pregnancy – and then also expand that to gender roles, and the opioid crisis, and some race commentary, and also maybe give Weisz a platform to flex some skills.

What this crowding also sacrifices are a lot of Whys and Hows. Not in terms of the forced twisty-turny plot (there’s a whole mystery box side character who’s arguably not needed for the actual story in any way), rather just in relation to reasons some of the big story points even matter: some more details on what a bespoke birthing center looks like – we’re given some headlines on poor treatment, and then bingo bango birth center fixes it – and how these turn into money-making machines for Rebecca, and why Genevieve is attracted to Beverly, and etcetera. There are lots of assumptions once can make, and none of this stuff is necessary for things to keep moving, but the lack of discussion is part of the shallow feel – the show makes the assumptions for us, which, to me, renders most of it unimportant. …Except these are many of the central cogs in the show’s machine.

Visually, Dead Ringers has some wins. While one of the unaddressed Whys is why the birthing center’s design goes for 100% blood red everywhere – except that it definitely looks striking and cool – less superficially, I did appreciate how graphic (said without negative connotations) the show was willing to get with its birth scenes. This, finally, was in line with the stated desire of normalizing the event. In general, it’s a show that’s very frank with women’s bodies and lives, and that’s refreshing. While I’ll allow that my lack of connection to the material may be because I am a childless, vagina-less dude, and I have issues with the writing itself, the show is undeniably focused on a female perspective, without pandering otherwise. I do think, beyond curiosity, that helps make it an easy watch, given your comfort with the genre: it arrives with confidence in how it talks and walks.

If the writers had more effectively centralized one idea, and / or if Weisz had had a bit more nuance in her evil twin / good twin approach, Dead Ringers could’ve been more than a conceptually interesting update that screams “IT’S ALL CONNECTED” at you while sashaying about in a blood-red dress.