In the anecdotal interest of full disclosure: I first saw Dead Ringers when I was an adolescent--fourteen, to be precise; I watched it back-to-back on video with another new-release rental, Big. Two less complementary films I cannot imagine, and I took what I then thought was the high road: Tom Hanks' Fred Astaire atop a giant piano mixed with Dead Ringers' gynecological shenanigans led to my juvenile assessment of the safe film as being "good" and the confrontational one as being "bad." (To the male teenager, a woman's body is like a microwave: he doesn't want to know how it works, he just wants to use it to warm up his burrito.) A recent second viewing of Dead Ringers has called for some revisionism: this is a fine and--despite garnering critical praise and a handful Genie awards (Canada's Oscar equivalent)--underrated motion picture, director and co-screenwriter David Cronenberg at his most contemplative.

Jeremy Irons plays the Mantle Twins, Bev and Elliot, noted fertility doctors in the habit of exchanging identities out of convenience. After Claire (Genevieve Bujold), a famous actress unable to bear children, has an appointment with Bev, she unwittingly takes Elliot home with her. The following day, it is Bev who drops by on a post-coital visit, and a confused but smitten Claire offers him a relationship. We slowly learn that Bev is not as socially adept as Elliot, that he would still be virginal without his brother. He's also the emotionally weaker of the two--there is some inquiry into his name, as if the Mantle parents had wished for fraternal twins, a boy and a girl. Bev falls in love with Claire, a pill-popper, and thus begins his downward spiral into drug abuse and a mental breakdown symbiotic with Elliot's.

Irons has yet to top his dual-performance. Never mind that Cronenberg's computer-controlled split-screening effects are technically flawless: Irons creates two distinct characters without resorting to cheap physical tricks--Bev and Elliot have subtly different speech patterns and separate methods of interaction. It is astonishingly easy to differentiate the Mantles when only one of the two is on screen. I cared deeply about both brothers; one heartbreaking sequence involves Bev and Elliot dancing together with lovely Cary (Heidi Von Palleske) to "In the Still of the Night," at which point we realize the codependence of their relationship--the brothers are Siamese in spirit--and the inevitable tragedy of events to come.

Yet the finale of Cronenberg's tale is not entirely forseeable. His reputation as a scientifically inquisitive (read: violent and anatomy-obsessed) filmmaker leads one to expect a much more gruesome capper, especially with a horrifying collection of "tools for examing mutant women" on display. I suspect that women are mortified by this movie because almost everything in the examination scenes is left to the imagination: the familiar squirms and grunts of the female patients are doubly effective in a Hitchcockian manner.

Dead Ringers unfolds in blue, sterile places--even the Mantle home gleams like an operating room--but the movie is shot through with a curious warmth. (Howard Shore's lush score helps considerably.) I was not a fan of Cronenberg's recent Crash: despite the absence of medicine, it felt much more clinical than Dead Ringers. But The Dead Zone and The Fly are horror classics (a true classic transcends its genre), sentimental stories beneath gross-out surfaces. Cronenberg is a premed student stuck in film school, closely examining situations with a nerd's curiosity and thoroughness though sometimes exercising the freedom afforded by cinema to simply stand back and observe. I dare say Dead Ringers is first and foremost an entertaining film for its complete and honest storytelling.-Bill Chambers