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Amazon’s Cronenberg remake brings fresh gruesome thrills, but ITV’s dramatisation of the 2010 manhunt feels flatI’ll tell you about Dead Ringers, created by Alice Birch (who co-adapted Normal People and has written for Succession), once I’ve removed my safety goggles and had a piping hot shower. There’s no stinting on reproductive gore in this Amazon Prime Video six-part remake of David Cronenberg’s psychological thriller about twin gynaecologists descending into mania. The 1988 film, starring Jeremy Irons, featured surgical instruments so misshapen and disturbing it was difficult to watch without squirming, but nor is this remodel for the faint-hearted. Babies pound out of vaginas; arms delve biceps-deep into oozing caesarean slits. I haven’t seen this much gushing blood since the lift scene in The Shining. Here is the miracle of life writ large as a fecund battlefield. Birch seems on a mission to do for childbirth what Normal People did for sex: as near as dammit show it for real.You could be forgiven for groaning “not another reimagined” old film! But the new series doesn’t aim to be a dead ringer, as it were, for the original. It’s gender-swapped, with Rachel Weisz playing the female gynaecologist twins: domineering, drug-addled, sexually predatory Elliot (all flowing mane and punk sizzle) and the tense, subdued lesbian Beverley (hair yanked back; soon shown miscarrying her own pregnancy). They act as one when skewering a drooling sexist oaf (“Is your imagination so fucked you have to see everything twice before your dick gets hard?”), when they swap identities for Elliot to procure a new lover (Britne Oldford) for Beverley, and in getting their precious birthing centre funded. Then there is the sickly sweet toxicity of their twindom, the chokehold of co-dependence. Continue reading...