Amazon Prime Video
fromĚý21 April
Advertisement
WE OFTEN make the mistake of seeing twins as incomplete halves of a single person, particularly if they are identical. Worse, they arouse notions of good and evil or nature and nurture, inviting comparison at every turn.
For some, it may be difficult to resist comparing a new TV version of Dead Ringers, airing on Amazon Prime Video, with the 1988 film.
The original is a maelstrom of psychosexual torment from director David Cronenberg, the uncontested king of the venereal and the visceral. Identical twin gynaecologists Beverly and Elliot Mantle (played with lurid aplomb by Jeremy Irons) swap personas and share sexual partners without those partners’ knowledge. When one relationship unsettles their delicate balance, it leads to a violent identity crisis.
Fans of the film (I am one) might worry the TV show, steered by writer Alice Birch, will merely bang the same Freudian drum. Don’t. This reimagining of Beverly and Elliot as sisters (played by Rachel Weisz) is its own animal. But it is every bit as red in tooth and claw as Cronenberg’s film.
While the twins remain gynaecologists who swap their mismatched personalities – Elliot is childish and confident, Beverly is stony and stifled – their goals are very different. Rather than the avaricious misogyny that propels the brothers, the sisters are out to improve the reproductive health of everyone in their care.
The show’s gory scenes of birth and surgery are rooted in the real risks of childbirth. Two poignant scenes highlight the disparity in care received by Black women in particular. In one, a mother’s post-Caesarean agony is fatally ignored by her doctor. In another, Beverly sees a vision of Anarcha Westcott, one of many enslaved women who, in the 19th-century US, were experimented on without anaesthetic by James Marion Sims, the “father of gynaecology”. As a viewer, you share the twins’ desire to radicalise obstetrics.
That isn’t to say the Mantles have been canonised. Elliot gets off on asking her patients’ partners to expose themselves to her, and neither sister has qualms about Elliot seducing women on Beverly’s behalf.
Despite some reservations, the sisters chase funding from the billionaire Parker family. Episode 2 sees the pair at a retreat for health magnates, full of smirking biohackers and simpering wellness gurus who are united only by their wealth and strange predilections. It is as darkly funny as anything in Succession.
If that wasn’t murky enough, Elliot is pushing the ethical boundaries of reproductive tech. Again, Birch draws on the real world: we are at a point where our abilities to grow embryos for more than 14 days in the lab have outstripped legal restrictions.
Elliot pays no heed to such trivia as international law, illicitly culturing embryos for far longer, as well as experimenting on a woman in a desperate state who couldn’t meaningfully consent. The show is never better than when it wrestles with the ways in which extraordinary advances in healthcare could lead to obscene inequality in the hands of the rich.
All of this should signal that the new Dead Ringers is fizzing with ideas, sometimes so much so that the six-parter had me breathless. I rarely found myself thinking about Cronenberg or Irons. This twisted romp through the frontiers of medical ethics stands completely alone, no comparisons required.
Bethan Ackerley is a subeditor atĚý91av. She loves sci-fi,Ěýsitcoms and anything spooky.ĚýShe is still upset aboutĚýthe ending of GameĚýofĚýThrones. Follow herĚýon Twitter @inkerley
Bethan also recommends…
All 4 (UK); on demand (US)
Con artist Sarah Manning witnesses the death of a woman who looks just like her. After assuming her identity, Sarah learns she has more doppelgangers.
Ěý
Tim Wardle
Netflix
This documentary follows identical triplets adopted byĚýdifferent families. What happened when they were reunited is as fascinating as the circumstances of their separation are disturbing.
