Jeremy Irons makes the twin doctors in David Cronenberg’s Dead Ringers painfully believable. This is excellent, deeply unsettling horror, though its concentration on the brothers sometimes leaves Geneviève Bujold’s Claire Niveau with too little room.
The most unsettling thing in Dead Ringers is how little professional authority tells us about the person exercising it. David Cronenberg gives the Mantle twins the standing of doctors and asks us to sit with their dependence on each other, without pretending that expertise makes either man emotionally competent. This is excellent, distressing horror, with an occasional stiffness that keeps its people at a distance. Jeremy Irons makes their relationship worth the discomfort.
The double performance works because we stop admiring the difficulty of it and start worrying about the two men. Beverly Mantle and Elliot Mantle remain distinct enough for their dependence to hurt; we do not have to regard them as interchangeable to understand why they struggle to separate. We felt unexpectedly sorry for them. It was the sight of two capable doctors unable to manage a life apart that did it, and Jeremy Irons makes their need for one another uncomfortable without making it ridiculous.
Geneviève Bujold gives Claire Niveau enough force to make us want the film to spend more time with her. An actress involved with both doctors, Claire could easily be reduced to the woman who disturbs an arrangement between men, and there are passages where the screenplay by David Cronenberg and Norman Snider does little more than that. Her presence helps resist it: she holds our attention even when the brothers’ problems dominate. The imbalance matters in a film so concerned with men’s authority over women’s bodies.
Peter Suschitzky’s cinematography makes the clinical surroundings unpleasant without making them obviously sinister. The clean surfaces suggest a place where somebody has control, which is precisely what we come to doubt. We found the red accents upsetting: against that clinical cleanliness, they kept making us think about blood. Carol Spier’s production design supports the unease, giving the doctors’ surroundings an orderliness that makes their instability harder to dismiss. The medical setting benefits from this restraint.
Ronald Sanders’s editing helps the double performance disappear into the drama. We can attend to the brothers’ dependence without being continually distracted by the business of one actor playing both parts. Howard Shore’s music is effective for a related reason: it allows room for sorrow in material that might otherwise invite only disgust. These are important contributions to the film’s patience with its characters, although the measured pace sometimes holds an uncomfortable situation in place after we have understood it.
As a horror film, Dead Ringers gets a great deal from our ordinary fear of trusting a doctor. Its relatively sparing use of gore leaves us thinking about the people authorised to examine a body, and how little we know about them. The dark humour never quite offers relief, because the brothers’ dependence remains painful even when their behaviour is absurd. Choose it for the acting and the sustained unease, but expect stretches where the slow pace becomes a test of patience.
