Dead Ringers (1988) on Netflix
Identical twins Elliot and Beverly Mantle run a fertility clinic in Toronto. Elliot, the confident one, seduces the patients, then hands them to his shy brother without the women ever knowing.
- Netflix3.1/5
- IMDb7.2/1059,625 votes
- Rotten Tomatoes85%
Trailer
Plot summary
The Mantle brothers, Elliot and Beverly, are identical twins who share a thriving Toronto practice treating fertility problems. Elliot is confident and cynical, Beverly shy and passive. Elliot seduces women who come to the clinic, and when he tires of them he hands them to his brother, who takes his place while the women remain unaware of the swap. Actress Claire Niveau comes to the clinic about her infertility and is found to have a trifurcated cervix, which likely means she cannot have children. Elliot seduces her, and presses Beverly to sleep with her too. Beverly grows emotionally attached to Claire, and also starts taking the prescription drugs she abuses, supplied through his position as a doctor.
Cast
- Nick Nicholsas Leo
- Miriam Newhouseas Mrs. Bookman
- David Hughesas Superintendent
- Richard W. Farrellas Dean of Medicine (as Richard Farrell)
Did you know?!Facts and trivia about Dead Ringers (1988)
Can contain spoilers, watch the movie first.
- The twin gynaecologists came from a real case. Producer Carol Baum told David Cronenberg about the brothers Stewart and Cyril Marcus and sent him articles and the novel Twins, and Cronenberg then found an Esquire piece about the pair with the title he kept: Dead Ringers.
- By Jeremy Irons' account on the DVD commentary, Robert De Niro turned down the Mantle twins because the subject matter and playing gynaecologists made him uneasy, while William Hurt refused on the grounds that it is hard enough to play one role.
- An early backer, the Lebanese producer Sylvio Tabet, wanted to shoot Norman Snider's first draft; Cronenberg rejected it and wrote another, which Tabet disliked. Cronenberg said Tabet never paid him the $7,500 he was owed for the script work, and Tabet's investment ended in 1982.
- When the De Laurentiis money fell away, $300,000 of sets already stood in leased buildings and Jeremy Irons had signed on. Cronenberg said scrapping them would have cost another $30,000, so he rented the buildings out to other productions until Morgan Creek came in with the money.
- Jeremy Irons was given two dressing rooms and two sets of costumes, one for each brother, and refused the arrangement. Believing the audience should sometimes be unsure which twin they were watching, he used a single room and mixed items from both wardrobes, and used the Alexander technique to give each man different energy points.
- Cronenberg shot and then removed a dream sequence in which an aged version of one brother grows out of the other's abdomen. He tested the film on audiences three ways, with no dream sequence, with one, and with both.
