Twins are weird, let’s face it. And they’re even weirder in the hands of darkly cerebral Canadian filmmaker, David Cronenberg. Will they be stranger still when they’ve been remade and gender-flipped? We’ll find out soon enough when the new miniseries Dead Ringers hits Prime Video on April 21.
You remember the 1988 original, of course, which saw the great Jeremy Irons playing the roles of twin gynaecologists Elliot and Beverly Mantle, who shared a medical practice, a number of women, and eventually a suicide pact as a result of their debilitating co-dependency. It’s a banger, albeit a deeply unsettling one (see: Cronenberg, David).
This iteration sees the fantastic Rachel Weisz (all manner of great roles but immortalised in The Mummy) playing the Mantle twins who, as the official synopsis handily informs us, “are on a mission to change the way women give birth, starting in Manhattan.”
Weisz is also on board as an executive producer, while award-winning British playwright and screenwriter Alice Birch (Lady Macbeth, Succession) serves as head writer and showrunner. Britney Oldford co-stars as Genevieve, the love interest who (presumably comes between the pair, while Poppy Liu, Michael Chernus, and Jennifer Ehrle round out the main cast.
Other than that, details are thin on the ground. But one thing from the teaser trailer jumps out at us: one of the Mantles is pregnant, something the Irons versions never had to contend with, which opens up a number of intriguing (and potentially disturbing) possibilities in terms of how this take diverges from the original.
Well, not quite original. Cronenberg’s film was based on the novel Twins by Bari Wood and Jack Geasland, which was in turn loosely inspired by the real life case of Stewart and Cyril Marcus, which gives this version a wealth of material to draw upon. We just hope they keep the freaky custom medical instruments that squicked us out in the ’88 movie.
