Streaming on Prime Video Friday, April 21
We find such fascination in the examination of madness. In 1988, David Cronenberg made a film called Dead Ringers. It was based on a novel called Twins by Bari Wood & Jack Geasland, which was based on a series of articles about a set of OB/GYN twins who died because of their codependency. In the new Prime Video series, Alice Birch (creator, writer, and executive producer) re-explores this fascination. Rachel Weisz, starring as twins Elliot and Beverly Mantle, is our guide through a 6-episode descent into a story so frenzied you don’t know whether to weep, group text your friends, or toss your obviously possessed TV out the window.
Dead Ringers follows Weisz as a pair of brilliant gynecologists who seek to innovate the way women give birth and how we age. But they’ll need a lot of money before they can open the birthing center and research lab they are dreaming of. The Twins pitch their concept to a headass billionaire (Jennifer Ehle), who legitimately makes you want to slap box her into oblivion. I’m not kidding, there is a series of dinner parties during which the wealthy folks are so smug and condescendingly destructive that I considered roasting them with Old Bay and “eating the rich.”
That’s the thing about Dead Ringers, the symbolism (motherhood and leeches), the blood (torrents of it), the love (both familial and erotic), the sound effects (relentless), and the writing (barb-wired and complex) all conspire to make you believe you’re losing it alongside one or both twins. Which one? IDK. But the madness is not yours or mine, it is this series. It is replete with reproductive science, gallows humor, and sibling obsession. Pardon me while I scream at Britne Oldford’s relatively sane character, Genevieve, to “GET OUT.” The scripts are crisp—mirroring characters who are free of self awareness—and the series is inarguably a study of madness; high on debauchery and untreated pathologies. By the end, you’ll need fresh tissue, to apologize to your friends, or to buy a new TV. Enjoy.
Originally posted on the Geek Girl Riot podcast on idobi.com
