Dead Ringers TV review — Rachel Weisz is superb as identical twin doctors in dark thriller

If your adaptation of a film by horror auteur David Cronenberg is prompting walkouts at screenings then chances are you’re doing something right. At the Canneseries festival on Saturday, there were reports of a few hasty exits after the opening minutes of Dead Ringers, which confronts viewers with a graphic montage of women giving birth — the miracle of life reframed as grisly body horror.

Those who pass this early stress test will be rewarded with a dark, disquieting and delectably arch new take on Cronenberg’s 1988 chiller about identical twin gynaecologists. While it shares much of the same DNA in terms of the narrative and outré feel, this six-part Amazon limited series from screenwriter Alice Birch (Normal People) is no pastiche of the original movie. Rather it is an assured, more expansive reinterpretation that supplements queasy thrills with timely sociopolitical commentary.

The most significant departure is that the Mantle brothers, Elliot and Beverly, are now the Mantle sisters, played by Rachel Weisz (who takes the mantle, as it were, from Jeremy Irons). If gender-swap reboots can often seem like uninspired gimmicks, here it allows Birch to move past the Mantles’ perverse lust and disgust towards their patients to a more meaningful interrogation of the healthcare model that, according to one of the Drs Mantel, “bullies . . . humiliates . . . and ruins women”.

That said, the gender-flipped Elliot and Beverly are no less troubled, or troubling, than their male predecessors. Despite their diametrically different personalities — the former a devil-may-care reveller and god-playing doctor, the latter a high-strung, ethical idealist — the two are obsessively attached to one another to the point that they’ve never spent a night apart. Uncannier still is that one can seamlessly assume the identity of the other, allowing them to share everything from patients to lovers.

But when Beverly falls for Genevieve (Britne Oldford) and starts planning a life and family independently of her sister, Elliot feels jealous and abandoned. Symbiosis soon gives way to cynicism, sarcasm and sabotage, and gradually the invisible connective tissue which has fused them together for decades begins to tear.

Weisz never once buckles under the strain of having to convince as two separate characters and build an intricate relationship between them. While the show hinges on her superb performances, she is well supported by Jennifer Ehle — who stars as a brilliantly gelid, Sackler-esque investor in the Mantles’ clinic — and blessed with a scalpel-sharp, sweary script by Birch and her all-female writing team. The direction, meanwhile, sustains an intense, uneasy atmosphere throughout, not least in two excruciating dinner scenes.

After all, is there truly anything more horrifying than a kombucha soirée hosted by a Big Pharma billionaire, attended by wellness-obsessed elites and featuring a choir of talentless children singing Coldplay? Not even the birthing montage, if you ask me.

★★★★☆

On Amazon Prime Video from April 21