Dead Ringers on Amazon looks even more horrifying than the 1988 original

On Tuesday, Prime Video shared the teaser trailer for its modern TV adaptation on 1988’s Dead Ringers starring Rachel Weisz. Based on David Cronenberg’s aforementioned psychological thriller starring Jeremy Irons, this new interpretation from showrunner Alice Birch (Normal People, Succession) sees Weisz assuming Iron’s dual role as identical twin gynecologists Elliott and Beverly Mantle, albeit now recast as women.

The brief teaser, set to Blondie’s 1979 single “Heart of Glass,” shows only a half-a-minute glimpse at Weisz as Elliot and Beverly, seated side by side one another, garbed in the red surgical scrubs first seen in Cronenberg’s film.

It’s not entirely clear which of the two Weiszes on-screen is portraying which Mantle sibling, but going off of what we already know from the original, the one on the left is likely Elliot, looking calm with her hand resting gentle on what appears to be a baby bump, while the one on the right is Beverly, visibly disheveled with her face and hands coated in blood.

Image: Prime Video

“Radicalism always begins with something small,” Weisz says over a subsequent shot of Elliot and Beverly looking through a window at a baby in a bassinet, dressed in an identical white doctor’s coat and red undershirt. It’s already apparent, even from this relatively short teaser, that Birch and Weisz’ take on Dead Ringers will explore its themes and horrors in ways the original did not.

In Cronenberg’s film, the catalyst for the twins’ disastrous falling out and subsequent spiral into violent misogynistic paranoid delusion is Beverly’s infatuation for Claire Niveau (Geneviève Bujold), a beautiful actress struggling with infertility, who approaches the Mantle siblings for help. Is it possible that the source of the Mantles’ split in this new adaptation is not some calamitous love affair, but rather a disagreement stemming from one sister’s desire to have a child? We’ll have to wait until April to find out.

Dead Ringers premieres April 21 on Prime Video.