A Terminal Case of Brotherly Love DEAD RINGERS

By RICHARD CORLISS

Each man films the thing he loathes. That seems the rule, anyway, for directors who investigate the darker locales in cinema's emotional landscape. Alfred Hitchcock, Luis Bunuel, Federico Fellini found artistry in images that terrified or disgusted them. Their bad dreams became their best movies.

Thus it is with the gifted Canadian filmmaker David Cronenberg. Images of corporal corruption -- of malefic birth and voracious organs -- stalk his They Came from Within, Rabid, The Brood, Scanners and Videodrome. Heads explode, and monsters issue from the wombs of women. In Cronenberg's masterwork, The Fly, one man wages a heroic, doomed struggle against physical and moral degeneration; his body has a twisted mind of its own. The catalog of punishments seems medieval -- Savonarola meets Bosch -- even as it taps baby boomers' fears of decaying vitality and eviscerated dreams. For Cronenberg the body is a haunted house whose rumblings trigger lust, mystery and excruciating pain in the poor tenant. This property is condemned.

So the subject of twin gynecologists, driven to dementia and a symbiotic murder-suicide by urges that both share but neither understands, seems a scenario only Cronenberg could dream up. In fact, the story comes from the novel Twins, by Bari Wood and Jack Geasland, which in turn was based on the case history of Drs. Cyril and Stewart Marcus, a pair of respected gynecologists who in 1975 were found dead in a Manhattan apartment. From these threads Cronenberg has spun a fantasia of split personality and the vulnerable male ego. The film's identical twins, Elliot and Beverly Mantle (both played by Jeremy Irons), are Toronto doctors with a reputation for radical technique and a comforting bedside manner. The rep is, in a way, only half earned. Ellie is the suave salesman; Bev is the genius of research. Cool Ellie is the connoisseur of female flesh; nerdy Bev probes deeper for his elusive womanly ideal. He wishes there were beauty contests for the insides of bodies.

Then Claire Niveau (Genevieve Bujold) comes to the Mantle fertility clinic. She is a famous actress with a healthy sexual appetite, a trifurcate cervix and the desperate yen to bear a child. Desire stirs Bev's instincts; propriety tries to tamp them down. It is a dangerous move to admit someone besides Ellie into his secret life. Love for an outsider will distort the twins' delicate imbalance. They had been complementary halves of one identity: body and mind, | curiosity and compassion, sex and guilt, Don Juan and Don Knotts. Now the seesaw must tip from sanity to psychosis.

At times Dead Ringers also tilts out of coherence, with scenes that are dramatically stillborn. But Irons is splendid in both roles, and Cronenberg can create tour-de-force tableaux with his effortless black magic. In one, Bev strides into surgery dressed in red, like a demon priest at a sacrificial rite. The victim is woman; her crime is woman's unique advantage over man, the power to produce perfect new bodies from the most vulnerable part of her own. Any mad scientist, any man, can try either to serve that power or to destroy it. And Bev must finally love the two things he kills: a woman's procreative strength, and his own better, brotherly half.