Product Description

In Dead Ringers, David Cronenberg tells the chilling story of identical twin gynecologists-suave Elliot and sensitive Beverly, bipolar sides of one personality-who share the same practice, the same apartment, the same women. When a new patient, glamorous actress Claire Niveau, challenges their eerie bond, they descend into a whirlpool of sexual confusion, drugs, and madness. Jeremy Irons' tour-de-force performance-as both twins-raises disturbing questions about the nature of personal identity.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #57389 in DVD
• Released on: 1998-10-14
• Rating: R (Restricted)
• Aspect ratio: 1.66:1
• Formats: Color, DVD, Letterboxed, NTSC
• Original language: English
• Number of discs: 1
• Running time: 116 minutes

Amazon.com essential video
Like many other films by Canadian director David Cronenberg (especially Crash), Dead Ringers presents the cinematic and psychological equivalent of an automobile accident--you dare not look, but you can't turn away. The film marked a directorial breakthrough for Cronenberg, who was able to continue some of the themes explored in his earlier horror films while graduating to a higher, more critically "respectable" level of artistic sophistication. The film is loosely based, amazingly enough, on a true story about twin gynecologists who routinely traded each others' identities, lives and even lovers. Utilizing innovative split-screen technology (years before computer manipulation made such trickery much easier), the film stars Jeremy Irons in flawless dual roles as the identical brothers Beverly and Elliot Mantle. Their ability to instantly switch identities leads them to a shared relationship with a well-known actress (Genevieve Bujold) and, ultimately, a physical and psychological tailspin that sends them both to the brink of madness and death. The scenario suggests that both men are halves of a whole, and that one cannot exist without the other. But when Beverly pursues a kinky, drug-addicted affair with the actress, his more self-controlled brother is helpless to prevent their mutual decline. In this way Dead Ringers becomes a fascinating and stylistically clinical study of duality, and Cronenberg doesn't shy away from the dark and unpleasant aspects of the story. (One look at the movie's display of bizarre gynecological instruments and you'll know why women find this film particularly--and unforgettably--disturbing.) --Jeff Shannon

DVD features
The Criterion Collection DVD includes illuminating commentary by Cronenberg, Irons, production designer Carol Spier, and others; extensive production information; interviews with the principal cast; and a detailed examination of the film's groundbreaking use of invisible special effects. --Jeff Shannon

Customer Reviews

Jeremy Irons' Best Work
Maybe it's the combined effect of having two Jeremy Irons for the price of one, but I believe -and Irons has been quoted to the same effect- that this is the finest work this fine actor has commited to the screen. Much more deserving of the oscar than his recessive Claus Von Bulow in 'Reversal of Fortune.'
The way he plays the weak twin off the stronger one, whose influence fades when a woman comes between them, is extraordinary. If you don't mind the pervasive grimness of the story in general, than do yourself a favor (God, starting to sound like that pretentious guy from the Actors Studio on Bravo), and get 'Dead Ringers.'

Great Minds Think Alike
After creating the viscerally charged and bewildering Videodrome, Cronenberg took on a few projects with a bit more mainstream appeal: The Dead Zone, The Fly, and this film: Dead Ringers.

It's not just a clever title (in fact, the movie was going to be called "Twins" until one of Cronenberg's old producers, Ivan Reitman, asked if he could use the title for a movie he was working on with Arnold Schwarzenegger and Danny DeVito). The movie stars -- and stars again -- Jeremy Irons as twin gynecologists, Beverly and Elliot Mantle. Although they are physically identical, their personalities take divergent paths as they grow older. Elliot grows into a confident womanizer, a sponge for the spotlight. Beverly withdraws into books, confident in little else other than his research.

They have a good thing going. Elliot woos the women and whisks them off of their feet, and when he tires of them, he hands them off to his bro Bev. The ladies are, apparantly, none the wiser. None, that is, until they try the stunt on Claire Niveau. Claire is a melodramatic and needy type, who has a steady addiction to pills, but she's also a pretty popular actress -- a student of human actions -- and the difference between the two men's faces are easier to hide from her than the differences between their hearts. It doesn't help matters, of course, that Beverly falls in love with her.

Like many Cronenberg films, a wealth of subtext buoys the plot along, but in this case it's just as easy to enjoy the film even if you don't necessarily "get" it. The surface ripples show two men who struggle against the divisiveness of fear and longing, how they clutch at sanity and each other as if they were the same thing. Addictions to love, to drugs, to success, and to power send them spinning around each other in mutual orbits of decay. Each tries to save the other, but it's like bootstrapping in quicksand. Neither has the ground to stand on.

Those who look close enough will see elements of Cronenberg's typically fetishistic influences: bizarre tools, the polar strategies of lunacy vs. logic, weird biologies (Claire has a mutation that becomes a fixation for one of the brothers). There's more at stake than just school boy crushes becoming grown man crazies. There's also the unity of brotherly love, salvation in sinning, and something that Beverly creepily refers to as "inner beauty."

Most of the subtleties of the film are found in Jeremy Irons, who plays both brothers with a skill that can only be described as phenomenal. With the help of cutting edge special effects techniques (this before the days of CGI and digital enhancement), Irons' brothers are an amazingly convincing pair. His performances shatter into dizzying, multi-facted brilliance as the plot progresses, until it is sometimes hard to tell which brother is which. The stunning sureness of his approach to the two characters is, by itself, enough to make this movie worth watching and owning.

It is also recommended, of course, by Cronenberg's directorial talent for deifying degradation. His sharp-eyed lens is layered with images of blood-shot confusion and the clutter of offices and brains, but without a doubt it spells out something engaging, it pieces together the details of something altogether absorbing. Leave it up to Cronenberg (with the two-fold talent of Irons at his disposal) to mastermind a movie that gives a radiant, uplifting glory to a film that -- like almost all of Cronenberg's -- slowly spirals down the gutter of despair.

Jeremy Irons does more than just clone himself in this role!
The Mantle brothers, Beverly and Elliot, are more than just identical twins. They're like two aspects of one person's internal character turned into two separate external realities. They're both brilliant gynecologists specializing in infertility problems with women and have spent their whole lives living as if they were one individual. They live in the same flat, work at the same clinic and share the same unsuspecting women until Beverly falls in love and no longer wants to share. This emotional break initiates an evaluation of the self, ultimately calling into question the very nature of the brothers symbiotic relations. Can they survive without each other? Jeremy Irons does more than just clone himself in this role, but engenders the brothers Mantle with two distinctive characterizations that are convincing and compelling. Based on an actual case.