Dead Ringers

Beverly and Elliot Mantle are identical twin gynecologists who run a successful Toronto practice specializing in infertility. A childhood prologue shows the brothers as precocious, curious about sex in clinical terms, and intensely codependent. By medical school they have developed the gold-plated Mantle Retractor, an instrument that becomes industry-standard and makes them famous in the field. Beverly is shy, scholarly, sensitive; Elliot is brash, charming, and a womanizer. Elliot routinely sleeps with women first and then passes them to Beverly without their knowledge.

Actress Claire Niveau comes to the clinic seeking fertility treatment. She has a rare 'trifurcated cervix' — three uterine openings — and cannot conceive. Elliot sleeps with her first, then engineers Beverly's encounter with her. Claire eventually figures out the swap and is furious, but is drawn into an unexpectedly tender relationship with Beverly. Beverly falls deeply in love with her — a first in the twins' insular life.

Claire is addicted to prescription pills. She introduces Beverly to recreational use. Their relationship is strained by her travel for film shoots and Beverly's growing paranoia about losing her, and about being separated from Elliot. Beverly's drug use spirals. His clinical judgment collapses. He starts to believe his female patients have 'mutant' anatomy and commissions an avant-garde artist to fabricate grotesque steel gynecological instruments designed for working on mutant women. When he uses them on a patient at the clinic the woman is injured; the practice is suspended; the brothers' careers begin to unravel.

Claire leaves for an extended shoot. Beverly's collapse accelerates. Elliot, recognizing the depth of his brother's dependency on him, sets out to 'synchronize' with Beverly — to share his addiction so they can recover together. Instead, Elliot's own life dissolves into pills and isolation alongside Beverly's. The twins retreat into their increasingly squalid apartment, never going out, never receiving visitors.

In the climax, on the eve of their birthday, Beverly sets up a makeshift surgical theater on the kitchen floor. He gives Elliot anesthesia and uses the Mantle Retractor along with one of the grotesque mutant-instruments to perform a vivisection on his brother — separating them in some twin-symbolic ceremony Beverly has decided is the only way out. Elliot dies on the floor. Beverly leaves the apartment, walks to a phone booth, calls Claire, and says nothing when she picks up. He returns to the apartment, lies down beside Elliot's body in a pose that mirrors the brothers' shared sculpture, and the film closes on the two of them entwined on the floor.