This dark, eerie, multi-layered drama may stand as Cronenberg's masterpiece. The film is loosely based on the true case of the Marcus Twins and the novel about them, TWINS by Bari Wood.

The Mantle brothers, Beverly and Elliot, are brilliant gynecologists with an upscale Toronto practice. Elliot is charismatic and outgoing, Beverly is shy and hard-working; emotionally inseparable, the brothers function like psychological Siamese twins. They share everything, including women, until Beverly--the weaker of the two--falls in love with a neurotic, drug addicted, actress. Forced to separate from his brother for the first time, Beverly becomes hooked on drugs and suffers a complete mental breakdown. Elliot, unable to exist independently of his twin, soon joins Beverly in a nightmarish descent into madness and self-destruction. Irons plays the brothers (achieved with seamless camera trickery), whose award winning research in gynecology has brought them international acclaim. Wholly original and uniquely disturbing, it could have been made by an alien, providing he had David Cronenberg's healthy disregard for commercial cinema and a unique sense of the human condition.

"Dead Ringers" is based on a true story.

Peter Grundy, the assistant art director, designed the unusual surgical instruments for the film. The mechanical design is by Walter Klassen.

Excerpt: "I need the humiliation and the work." -- Actress Claire Niveau (Genevieve Bujold) to her agent.

"Pain is distortion." -- Beverly or Elliot Mantle (Jeremy Irons) to Claire Niveau (Genevieve Bujold)

DVD Features:

Region 1
Keep Case
Widescreen - 1.85
Audio:
Dolby Surround 5.1 English
Dolby Surround Stereo 2.0 English
Additional Release Material:
Behind the Scenes Featurette
Audio Commentary: by Jeremy Irons
Interviews: Cast/Filmmaker Interviews and Filmographies
Dead Ringers Psychological Profiler
Trailers: Theatrical Trailer

Distributor Notes: Claire Niveau is in love with Beverly. Or does she love Elliot? It's uncertain because brothers Beverly and Elliot Mantle are identical twins sharing the same medical practice, apartment and women - including unsuspecting Claire.

In portrayals that won the New York Film Critics Best Actor Award, Jeremy Irons plays twin gynecologists whose emotional dependency collapses into mind games, madness and murder. Genevieve Bujold, the Los Angeles Film Critics Best Supporting Actress choice,? is Claire. And David Cronenberg (The Fly) won Los Angeles Film Critics Best Director honors for melding split-screen techniques, body doubles and Irons? uncanny acting into an eerie, fact-based tale ?unnerving but also enthralling? (Desson Howe, The Washington Post).

Source: Warner Home Video

Jeremy Irons: Actor, THE FRENCH LIEUTENANT'S WOMAN/REVERSAL OF FORTUNE
Geneviève Bujold: Canadian actress, ANNE OF THE THOUSAND DAYS, EARTHQUAKE
Heidi Von Palleske: Supporting Actress
Barbara Gordon: Actress
David Hughes: Star, mostly TV, appeared in Anne of Green Gables (1985)

David Cronenberg: Canadian Director/Screenwriter, THE FLY (1986)

David Cronenberg: Canadian Director/Screenwriter, THE FLY (1986)
Marc Boyman: PRODUCER
Carol Baum: 
Sylvio Tabet: Producer/Executive

David Cronenberg: Canadian Director/Screenwriter, THE FLY (1986)
Norman Snider: SCREENWRITER

Howard Shore: 

"...DEAD RINGERS announces David Cronenberg's full maturity as a director, period....To think of a film this assured, this unified and this dizzyingly potent, you have to go back to BLUE VELVET..."
"David Cronenberg's best movie..."
"...Irons has never been better....It's the confidence and disturbing beauty of Cronenberg's direction that makes this a minor classic..." -- 4 out of 5 stars
"...[Irons gives a] seamless performance, a schizophrenic marvel....Not easily forgotten..."
"...Cronenberg's masterpiece of infinite regression....RINGERS is an epistemological horror film a nightmare of entrapment in an imperceivable situation..."