Beverly and Elliot Mantle, the fatally interconnected identical twins of David Cronenberg’s Dead Ringers (1988), succumb to a grotesque form of folie a deux under the dual influences of drug addiction and an actress, Claire Niveau, who disrupts their lives in a way they have never experienced before. As world renowned gynaecologists specialising in female infertility, the twins enjoy top-notch professional reputations as challengers to medical orthodoxy and innovators of new surgical techniques but live a complicated, morally indefensible personal life based on unethical medical practices and deception. The narrative reveals early on that the brothers take full advantage of the fact that no one can tell them apart physically, though their personality differences as skilfully portrayed by actor Jeremy Irons in both roles manifest soon enough. Elliot as the slicker socialite of the two often initiates the seduction of select female patients who are none the wiser when the more reserved and bookish Beverly takes Elliot’s place in their beds. Claire eventually discovers this deception and confronts the brothers, but then maintains an exclusive relationship with Bev that begins the process of psychological separation between the Mantles. Beverly becomes increasingly unstable as his drug abuse and the stress of separation from Elliot wear on him, leading to a pathological obsession with female anatomical deviations that leads him to create new gynaecological instruments that look unsettlingly like medieval torture devices designed to, as he puts it, operate “on mutant women.” As it turns out, Beverly’s experiment in independent living dooms both twins to a downward spiral of drug addiction. They cannot ultimately live without the other. They die entwined together, indistinguishable from conjoined twins such as the famous “Siamese twins,” in the haunting tableaux that ends the film. Cronenberg’s character study of the life and death of the “wonderful Mantle boys,” as Claire’s friend calls them, remains to this day one of his most successful and critically well received “mainstream” films, its reputation as a psychological horror story assured. Jeremy Irons, although inexplicably not nominated for an Oscar for his stellar performance, nevertheless made a point of thanking David Cronenberg in Irons’s acceptance speech after winning the Oscar for another film, Reversal of Fortune (1990). Dead Ringers is certainly one of the most critically analysed films of his career, with scholars examining it over the years through a variety of theoretical lenses, from feminism to body horror to identity construction (or deconstruction). Although the film is now over thirty years old, its merciless spotlight on the predatory male doctors who take sexual advantage of their vulnerable female patients seems remarkably prescient in the “Me Too” era of the twenty-first century. The film’s legacy is relevant enough to the contemporary moment that it was adapted into an Amazon television series helmed by Alice Birch, which gender-flipped the Mantle brothers into the Mantle sisters (played by Rachel Weisz). Such a gender reversal brings an interesting new female perspective to the issues of identity fluidity and unorthodox challenges to conventional medical wisdom that were so integral to the characterisations of Beverly and Elliot Mantle. The cautionary tale of the Mantles retains its power to mesmerise as much today as it did in 1988.