In the Flesh: Dead Ringers Episode 1

That a remake of Croneberg’s Dead Ringers exists at all is strange enough. That it’s incredible is something else entirely. Alice Birch’s adaptation, penned by a murderer’s row all-women writers’ room and built around a breathtaking dual performance by Rachel Weisz as twin gynecologists Beverly and Elliot Mantle, is the good stuff, a bump and a fix wrapped up in bloody skeins of cut, neglected flesh and dripping with incestuous funk. From the macabre Annie Lennox-soundtracked dollhouse opening credits to the final shot of Elliot screaming in frustrated, jealous rage in an empty bathroom, every inch of the show’s first installment is meticulously planned and executed without the least trace of fussiness or artifice. Colors are rich, framing thoughtful and intellectually involved (we frequently see one twin set against an occluded half of the screen, for example, these structured absences suggesting a relationship in which existence itself is codependent, unsustainable in concert with full personhood), and the score, at once manic and dissociative, leavens and textures the show’s tone without overwhelming it.

The natal neglect and malpractice which forms the backbone of the episode’s conflict feels like a natural outgrowth of the arrogantly projected gender anxiety of the original film. As the Mantle twins Weisz manages to convey two completely separate emotional reactions to the systemic medical collapse unfolding around her without ever making a production out of it. The broad strokes of the twins’ personalities come across clearly, but it’s the little things, the stuff about principals and emotional range, where her subtle body language shines through. Montages of women trying to resist C-sections, dying in childbirth or shortly thereafter, and generally getting chewed up and spit out by the for-profit hospital system establish a relentless, exhausting atmosphere of constant crisis driving the twins to substance abuse and into the arms of monstrously repellent angel investors like the wonderfully restrained Rebecca Parker (Jennifer Ehle), whose well-spoken petty tyranny at a grant interview is skin-crawlingly reptilian.

That the twins are women in this outing serves to make their sibling relationship more classically pornographic in the eyes of those around them, as exemplified by the heckler who cajoles them to perform for him sexually. It’s inextricable from what goes on in the hospital where they work to impregnate fertile young women like broodmares for entitled, oblivious surrogacy clients and fight tooth and nail against indifferent staff in an attempt to save the lives of Black mothers and women too afraid to come to the hospital for prenatal care. One long, degrading slog to make giving birth safer and more humane as in your daily work you lower dead babies into their sobbing mothers’ arms and listen to colleagues ass-covering with grieving family members. Perhaps the episode’s most indelible image is a split-second memory a grieving husband experiences of his wife lying slumped on bloody sheets in a hospital bed, and then the same bed clean and empty. Birch has created a dizzying wonder of a show here, playing in the key of Cronenberg but with a vision distinctly all her own.