Dead Ringers

Elliot and Beverly Mantle are identical twins and brilliant fertility doctors who share a practice, an apartment and their women, who are never told there are two of them. When Beverly falls in love, the symbiosis begins to fail.

Cronenberg pulls almost all of the overt horror out and locates it in codependency and drug addiction instead. There is a set of gold surgical instruments for operating on mutant women that is the closest the film comes to a monster, and it is truly disturbing precisely because it is presented as sane.

Irons plays both twins with such precision that you always know which one you are watching, and he does it without gimmicks. He won the New York Film Critics Circle and Genie awards for it and was not even nominated for the Oscar, which is its own scandal.

It is based on a real case of twin gynaecologists found dead together in New York.

It is the least gory and most upsetting film Cronenberg made.