Dead Ringers Movie Review

Cronenberg's emotionally devastating study of the perverse relationship between identical twin gynaecologists, Beverly and Elliot Mantle, is an intense psychological drama which confronts his familiar preoccupations - fear of physical and mental disintegration, mortality, the power struggle between the sexes - without the paradoxical protection of visceral disgust. Instead, the abstract, expressionist imagery synthesises the physical and the mental. Courtesy of clever, unobtrusive trick camerawork, Irons gives a superlative performance as both twins. The delicate symbiotic balance between the brothers is suddenly upset by the eruption into their lives of hedonistic actress Claire (Bujold). As always, they share everything, including Claire, until Beverly realises that he has at last found something he does not want to share, and he is plunged into a whirlpool of emotional confusion; when Elliot tries to help, he too is sucked into the vortex of pain and despair. Likewise, Cronenberg pulls us deeper and deeper into his harrowing tale of separation and loss, the disturbing, cathartic power of which leaves one drained but exhilarated.Dead Ringers Movie Review

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Elliot locks Beverly into the clinic and tries to clean him up, taking pills himself to "synchronize". When Claire returns, Beverly leaves the clinic to be with her. When he returns to sobriety, he is concerned about his brother, and goes back to the clinic. There he finds the clinic in ruins and Elliot despondent and intoxicated. Their positions are reversed as Beverly cares for Elliot. Drugged and despairing, they celebrate their mock birthday and Elliot volunteers to be killed, "to separate the Siamese twins". Beverly disembowels Elliot on an examination couch.
Beverly pulls himself together, leaves the clinic and calls Claire on a payphone. When she asks, "Who is this?", Beverly leaves the payphone, walks back into the clinic and dies in Elliot's dead arms.

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Claire Niveau (Geneviève Bujold), comes to the clinic for her infertility. It turns out that Claire has a "trifurcated cervix", which means she probably will not be able to have children. Elliot seduces Claire and then urges Beverly to sleep with her.
When Beverly becomes attached to Claire, it upsets the equilibrium between the twins. When Claire learns of the twins' deception, she is angry but later decides to continue a relationship with Beverly exclusively.
Claire leaves to work on another film. This sends Beverly into clinical depression, heavy drinking, prescription drug abuse and paranoid delusions about "mutant women" with abnormal genitalia. Beverly seeks out metal artist Anders Wolleck and commissions a set of bizarre gynecological instruments for operating on these mutant women. Beverly is then put on administrative leave by the hospital board after collapsing on a patient.

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Dead Ringers is a 1988 psychological drama film starring Jeremy Irons in a dual role as identical twin gynecologists. Director David Cronenberg co-wrote the screenplay with Norman Snider; their script was based on the novel Twins by Bari Wood and Jack Geasland. The film is very loosely based on the lives of Stewart and Cyril MarcusElliot and Beverly Mantle are identical twins and highly successful gynecologists. Elliot, the more aggressive and confident of the two, seduces women who come to the Mantle Clinic. When he tires of them, the women are passed on to the shy and passive Beverly, while the women remain unaware of the substitution.
A troubled actress, Claire Niveau (Geneviève Bujold), comes to the clinic for her infertility. It turns out that Claire has a "trifurcated cervix", which means she probably will not be able to have children.