Cronenberg is the most surprising and shocking film director I know but he always deals with situations that are out of the ordinary and he pushes them to their extreme end or even beyond. In this film he explores the relation between two real twins who have perfectly identical routes in life to the point of becoming schizophrenic and wanting to get rid of the second half of their individual personality, which is the personality of the other. They become obsessed with separating the Siamese twins they are in a way and yet are not. This derangement develops all by itself and they discover that they cannot survive separately and as soon as one does something that the other does not do both of them are disturbed to the point of having to become morbid, death-obsessed, death-seeking, death-hungry and death-thirsty. Death becomes what they physiologically need, each one of them, and both of them, to survive by compensating the difference that has appeared in their relation. All that sounds crazy and is in fact just extremely natural, natural to the extreme. The death instinct, the other side of the libido, takes over when the slightest difference appears between them and is interpreted, unconsciously, subconsciously and even consciously, as a treason of their libido, or libidos, of their libidinous survival instinct. Their survival instinct calls their death instinct up to regulate the disruption and what has to happen happens: one kills the agreeing other and that one let himself die on the body of the one he has killed, the one who has died first. The supreme irony of that film is that these two identical twins are gynecologists by profession and they are giving birth to babies day after day, till they finally and mutually abort their own lives. Amazing. And what's worst in this picture is that it is realistically possible. Cronenberg here reveals the deep fear we feel in front of identical twins, a real vertigo, in Hitchcock's meaning of the word.



Dr Jacques COULARDEAU, University Paris Dauphine, University Paris 1 Pantheon Sorbonne & University Versailles Saint Quentin en Yvelines