Dead Ringers

Few directors maintain a consistent yet chameleon personal stamp on their films more than David Cronenberg. Despite such a diverse filmography, including mini-masterpieces in The Fly and Videodrome, it is ultimately Dead Ringers (1988) that possesses the greatest resonance to these eyes. Externally a psychological horror film detailing the growing disconnect between twin gynecological brothers as a girl comes between them, by film’s end Dead Ringers is far more concerned with issues of familial dependency and reliance on abstract definitions of humanity and mutation.

While the brothers, Elliot and Beverly Mantle (both played magnificently by Jeremy Irons), begin the film as symbiotically joined in thought and deed, with the dominant Elliot securing the submissive Beverly women as the two trade off, that homogeny of order is soon displaced with the appearance of an actress, Claire (Genevieve Bujold), who awakens Beverly to a consciousness of secrecy and dependency entirely apart from Elliot. Thus, while it is earlier understood that, as Elliot tells Beverly, “you haven't done anything until I've done it too,” Beverly finds that he and Elliot are growing estranged by their very different personas and aspirations.

So Cronenberg fashions a film reconciling this sense of separation from two people who always felt themselves to be one. The twins’ anatomy and how they identify with it, best showcased in a fever dream that Beverly has of Claire severing the link between he and Elliot with her teeth, becomes for Beverly a conscious decision to likewise alter and amputate the flesh of their patients, externalizing the submissive twin’s inner fears. Here we see the admittedly cold and sterile surgical tools to be used on the “mutant” women, and the tools’ subliminal horror is channeled into our growing understanding that the brothers are similarly headed toward a symbiotic amputation.

Aided by a Howard Shore title theme that is certainly the most haunting and evocative of his career, Cronenberg’s film ends with a humanist mourning on the inability of the brothers to, like the metaphorical Siamese twins they reference, live without the other. The tenderness displayed in the final shot refutes those who feel Cronenberg is too clinical here, as its composition returns to the images of art at the film’s beginning with their tragic return to a prelapsarian innocence. A tragic yet beautiful encapsulation of Cronenberg’s themes, and certainly his most personal film.

Dead Ringers: 10/10