| Horror
Movie Index
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Dead Ringers, 1989. Directed by David Cronenberg.
Jeremy Irons, Genvieve Bujold, Stephen Lack.
Irons gives his best performance on film (and, indeed, the best performance of the '80s by anyone) as twin gynocologists who disintegrate after an actress disrupts the delicate balance of their relationship. Radiates a deep and numbing chill as it chronicles the descent of the twins into madness and drug-addiction, with peripheral horrors thrown off at random as a result. The absence of his signature flamboyant gore effects only proves that David Cronenberg doesn't need them anymore (if he ever did) to peel back the audience's skin and scrape the raw nerves of their sensibilities. In their place, he has substituted imagery that is nearly as ferocious, with scarlet-clad doctors stalking though hermetic operating theaters, the creepy virtuosity with which the film convinces us that Jeremy Irons is two characters instead of one, and the stainless steel "gynecological instruments for mutant women." But mainly it is the ideas that push the envelope. Is there a scarier thought in horror movies than the idea that your doctor is not only insane and addicted to drugs, but is designing his own instruments? Is there another movie out there that makes us more aware of the ickier aspects of our own physicality? Or what happens when that physicality is out of whack? This is singularly unpleasant. Cronenberg's best film to date. |