Posted in: Amazon Studios, TV | Tagged: alice birch, amazon, Body Horror, david cronenberg, dead ringers, fleabag, rachel weisz, Succession

Dead Ringers: A Dark Comedy Remake in The World of Succession

Rachel Weisz gives the performances of her career in Dead Ringers, which is barbed & satirical enough to exist in the Succession universe.

You might wonder why David Cronenberg's psychological horror classic Dead Ringers needs to be rewritten other than this is the age of IPs getting updated remakes because streamers don't want to risk it on original stories anymore. But this is definitely not one of those remakes. Rachel Weisz delivers two performances of her career, playing Elliot and Beverly Mantle, brilliant twin doctors at the top of their field, which is childbirth and obstetrics. Weisz is hilarious and tragic as a dueling comedy couple of twin sisters as they pursue cutting-edge medical research but whose personalities are polar opposites: one outgoing and gregarious, the other grounded and awkward. Rachel Weisz has amazing chemistry with Rachel Weisz, playing each twin with such distinctive differences that you can immediately recognize each by their dress sense, speech, and body language. The story follows the essential part of the original Dead Ringers: twin doctors find their relationship unbalanced by one of them falling in love with a woman (Britne Oldford) whose presence throws off the dysfunctional balance of their relationship and leads to their destruction.

Dead Ringers from a Female Perspective

This Dead Ringers is a feminist remake in a post-Fleabag world. By that, we mean it fits in that subclass of scripts by women that are gleefully sexual, messy, and crazy, with flawed female characters expressing all their feelings and doing crazy things that in real life would get them not only cancelled but run out of town by a torch-wielding mob. This style of writing is a form of feminist escapism, even if the antiheroines meet a messy end. It's still hopeful for a world where women can express all their feelings without fear. It doesn't erase the memory or place of Cronenberg's original but earns its place as a complementary version next to it. Where Cronenberg's version is a commentary on misogyny and two men's desire to control women by understanding the biology of birth, the feminist remake miniseries has bigger fish to fry. It's a dark comedy and commentary on women trying to navigate the broken system of women's health, childbirth, and fertility.

Dead Ringers Should Exist in the Same Universe as Succession

Showrunner Alice Birch is a prolific British playwright, one of at least three British female playwrights who have written on Succession. Dead Ringers has the same kind of precise, barbed, heightened, and stinging dialogue that Succession has – and British playwrights are brilliant at. There's as much barbed commentary on Capitalism, Class, and the one percent here as anywhere else. There's a family of evil rich scumbags on Dead Ringers who might be even worse than anyone on Succession. It seems a prerequisite for actors on this show is the capacity for ruthless, bone-dry, nasty humour. Jennifer Ehle is a standout as a coldly venal billionaire who agrees to bankroll the twins' revolutionary birth center. Poppy Liu is also impressive as the twins' mysterious housekeeper, protector, and keeper of secrets. Feminist genre writing means women can be evil too but written with more nuance and empathy and even more ruthlessness. Ehle's family is astonishingly awful, and the dinner scenes in the series are like gladiatorial cage fights and possibly more horrific than the graphic senses of gory childbirth, bloody miscarriages, and surgical dissections. It feels like it could take place in the same universe as Succession, the gory, body horror corner of it, and even more nastily funny. You can imagine the Logans going around in this New York City, that Shiv could end up a client at the Mantles' birthing center.

This remake more than earns its place in the streaming landscape.

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