Dead Ringers, Prime Video, review: Weisz has twice the fun in this sweary, snarling reinvention

Dead Ringers is back. No, not the one where Jon Culshaw mimics Tom Baker’s Doctor. This is a six-part expansion of David Cronenberg’s wildly extreme 1988 film, in which Jeremy Irons played unethical twin gynaecologists and was overlooked for an Oscar.

Whereas many a film-rehashed-for-TV feels like the product of a sterile commissioning culture (I’m looking at you, American Gigolo), this is no runt sibling of its predecessor. The Mantle twins are still called Elliot and Beverly, they are still umbilically obsessed with each other, and still doing far-out, futuristic experiments with fertility. Also, as in the film, one of them falls for an actress who comes in for a consultation, thus creating a simmering triangle of rivalries that rises to a rolling boil.

The big difference is that the Mantles have regenerated in the guise of Rachel Weisz. Switching the gender of the protagonists enables showrunner Alice Birch (last seen on TV adapting Sally Rooney’s novels) to ask a question unavailable to Cronenberg. What happens if the doctors’ own fertility becomes an ingredient in the narrative? 

The double dose of Weisz takes an episode to adapt to. She wears her hair up as sane, sensible Beverly; down as feral, sexually rapacious Elliot (although at a key point they perform a canny switcheroo). While Weisz has lashings of fun embodying their asymmetries, telling the sisters apart isn’t always simple.

They communicate in matching twins-against-the-world repartee, and both have an identical commitment to swearing like fishwives. “We are as close to f---ing perfection as you can get in this field,” brags Beverly, “and I am not f---ing with you.” Honestly, the f-word should have asked for a royalty. And she’s meant to be the prim one.

Nor is anything left to the imagination visually. Dead Ringers lays on an obstetrician’s eye view of every parturition, however gory. The unflinching plot doesn’t entirely revolve around mad reproductive science. Along the way, it asks angry questions about the money that funds medical research, and the iniquities of a surrogacy industry where too-posh-to-push women can rent a womb as if it’s garage space.

In this world, more or less everyone’s a freak or a monster, chief among them Jennifer Ehle as a soulless big pharma profiteer, or Michael McKean as an old-school Dr Death with forceps. Only when the Mantles’ sweet, meek parents visit from England is a sane and rational note sounded. Over dinner, Elliot is saying something truly perverse about the interchangeability of twins and Kevin McNally as her old dad can take it no more. “Stop it!” he explodes. “You awful, awful girls!” It’s a measure of this seductive horror show that you want to watch these weird sisters carry on, and on.

All six episodes are available on Amazon Prime from Friday April 21