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Dead Ringers (1988)
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Reviews Counted: 35
Fresh: 29
Rotten:6
Average Rating: 7.7/10
Runtime: 1 hr 57 mins
Genre: Dramas
Synopsis: This dark, eerie, multi-layered drama may stand as Cronenberg's masterpiece. The film is loosely based on the true case of the Marcus Twins and the novel about them, TWINS by Bari Wood. The... This dark, eerie, multi-layered drama may stand as Cronenberg's masterpiece. The film is loosely based on the true case of the Marcus Twins and the novel about them, TWINS by Bari Wood. The Mantle brothers, Beverly and Elliot, are brilliant gynecologists with an upscale Toronto practice. Elliot is charismatic and outgoing, Beverly is shy and hard-working; emotionally inseparable, the brothers function like psychological Siamese twins. They share everything, including women, until Beverly--the weaker of the two--falls in love with a neurotic, drug addicted, actress. Forced to separate from his brother for the first time, Beverly becomes hooked on drugs and suffers a complete mental breakdown. Elliot, unable to exist independently of his twin, soon joins Beverly in a nightmarish descent into madness and self-destruction. Irons plays the brothers (achieved with seamless camera trickery), whose award winning research in gynecology has brought them international acclaim. Wholly original and uniquely disturbing, it could have been made by an alien, providing he had David Cronenberg's healthy disregard for commercial cinema and a unique sense of the human condition. [More]
Starring: Jeremy Irons, Geneviève Bujold, Heidi Von Palleske, Barbara Gordon
Starring: Jeremy Irons, Geneviève Bujold, Heidi Von Palleske, Barbara Gordon, David Hughes
Director: David Cronenberg
Director: David Cronenberg
Screenwriter: David Cronenberg, Norman Snider
Producer: David Cronenberg, Marc Boyman
Composer: Howard Shore
Producer: Carol Baum, Sylvio Tabet
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Reviews for Dead Ringers
Irons gives a highly accomplished performance in a chilly knife-swapping psychodrama that remains among the director's leanest, meanest releases.
Director David Cronenberg handles his usual fondness for gore in muted style.
People like myself who find the character played by [Genevieve] Bujold (in one of her best performances) more interesting than either of the twins are bound to feel rather frustrated by the end.
Impeccably executed, Cronenberg's first masterpiece is an unsettling film in which biological horror is entirely conveyed through pyschological exploration of character, masterfully played by Jeremy Irons in the best performance of his career.
It's one of Cronenberg's more complex relationship tales, that puts a deadly spin on separation, loss and hopeless love.
An intense psychological drama which confronts [Cronenberg's] familiar preoccupations -- fear of physical and mental disintegration, mortality, the power struggle between the sexes -- without the paradoxical protection of visceral disgust.
Irons is startlingly off-kilter, his performance a veritable textbook example of deranged if icy brilliance
Dead Ringers is not a fun or particularly upbeat film, but it does grab you by the collar and it sucks you right into the screen.
Extremely unsettling, at times amusing, cold yet personal, Dead Ringers gradually and deliberately comes to horrify the viewer, rather than shocking outright with such spectacular displays of gore.
Cronenberg, who has begun to emerge as a master of body-related horrific fantasy, clearly understands that a small amount of medical mischief can be more unnerving than conventional grisliness.
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