This chilling series is the most impactful you’ll see this month

Ambitious is the company in which the fantastic actress Rachel Weisz, here in her first series and exceptionally producer, and Alice Birch, showrunner, have committed themselves by deciding to adapt the eponymous 1988 cult film by David Cronenberg. Already at the time, the genre filmmaker, by staging the Mantle twins in the guise of the hilarious Jeremy Irons in the two title roles, was tackling the adaptation of the book Twins by Bari Wood (a title that Cronenberg was forced to modify for the cinema given the release of the film a few months earlier Twins with Danny DeVito and Arnold Schwarzenegger), itself inspired by the tragically famous real fate of the twins Stewart and Cyril Marcus, New York gynecologists in the 1970s. series Succession et Normal Peoplemanaged to break away to give us a series that pays homage to Cronenberg’s film without ever imitating it, while offering a new depth to the story.

False pretenses on Prime Video: Rachel Weisz in a destabilizing and enjoyable schizophrenia

Who still doubted the acting talents of Rachel Weisz, winner of an Oscar and a Golden Globe for The Constant Gardenerwho recently made an impression alongside Olivia Colman in The Favorite ? Not the pen that writes these lines in any case. But even with blind faith in the British-American actress’ acting palette, it’s clear that the challenge of portraying twins on screen, especially when they’re as complex as Beverly and Elliot Mantle, remains. a perilous exercise. But Rachel Weisz passes the obstacle with flying colors. She embodies the twins, gynecologists-obstetricians of genius who share everything: their apartment, their patients, and sometimes even their lovers. From the first episode, the fusional and toxic relationship that binds them and, above all, imprisons them, takes shape. Elliot is a go-getter, unscrupulous, ready to do anything to advance their embryonic research, even if it means going beyond all ethical and moral limits. Beverly is the sensitive counterpart of the tandem, plagued by the contradictions that oppose her humanism and her projects with her sister. Alternating without batting an eyelid between the gentle melancholy of one and the raw violence (verbal and physical) of the other, Rachel Weisz offers a destabilizing and always fair interpretation of these two geniuses in perdition, skilfully facing herself in which is akin to a camera that looks like a Hell of Dante.

A societal pamphlet with delightfully immoral characters

If the series is essentially based on this duo which, from the first minutes, appears to us as inevitably doomed to failure, just like in Cronenberg’s film, it is a social context that Alice Birch strives to depict to us from acid way. In a wealthy and elitist New York, where social diversity is an abstract notion and where women’s pregnancies are marketed like in a pet store, the Mantle twins try to set up a birthing center for women. If Beverly sees in it an opportunity to lead a social action for women in lack of means, Elliot concentrates rather on the field of scientific manipulations that this would open to him, having in mind the lucrative aspect of the affair. To do this, they will team up and come across delightfully immoral characters such as Rebecca, played by Jennifer Ehle (The speech of a king), a metaphorical and cynical figure of the dirtiest American capitalism, a character very largely inspired by the Sackler family, at the origin of the opioid crisis in the United States. An interpretation all the more puzzling as capitalism is all too often associated, in fiction, with male characters, and therefore finds an echo all the colder in the chilling mimics of the actress.

But it should be noted that False pretenses is not to be put in front of everyone’s eyes. If the sharp dialogues shock with a lot of politically incorrect replicas, the images too. The horrific ambition of David Cronenberg also transpires in certain inventive and extremely graphic scenes (beyond the mythical red blouses that Alice Birch has cleverly decided to reintroduce), which we will not describe in these lines so that everyone can enjoy of the surprise effect. A work of fiction that is not told but looked at, impossible to classify in a specific genre, which is synonymous with success here.