Review: Black Swan

Natalie Portman delivers a tour-de-force performance in Darren Aronofsky's terrifying portrait of madness, perfection, beauty, sexuality, and art.

Black Swan has a lot going for it: Natalie Portman, Darren Aronofsky, dope early-Soviet-era-inspired posters, Tchaikovsky. But like someone on a blind date, I went in with restrained expectations, hoping for the best but worried I’d be disappointed.

Where to begin? It's as if director Aronofsky sat me down and asked: "What would terrify you the most? Doppelgängers? A mother to rival Norma Bates? A Hitchcockian fixation on buns? Hangnails?" He opens up a world of beautiful horror and plunges you into the kind of disturbed psyche that is rarely captured on screen. Black Swan is a portrait of madness, perfection, beauty, sexuality, and art. Full of polar extremes – in terms of both narrative and visuals – the movie will wear you out so much you’ll feel like you've danced Odile's 32 fouettés by the time it’s over. But Black Swan isn't about ballet (like La Danse) or even dancers (like, and I'm going here, Center Stage) – it's about Nina (Natalie Portman).

Nina is a ballerina in a world-class ballet company based at the Lincoln Center in New York. She is cast as the Swan Queen in Swan Lake – the ballet equivalent to winning the Super Bowl – but as her debut approaches, she gradually goes mad. What’s so terrifying about Black Swan is that, as Nina spins out of control, the audience does too; shooting with a hand-held camera, Aronofsky plants us in the centre of Nina's world, collapsing the audience's and Nina’s perspective and leaving us, like her, wondering what’s going on. With Nina's world almost exclusively based in her mother's seemingly windowless Upper West Side apartment and the bowels of the Lincoln Center, where we rarely see the light of day, we also lose sense of time, which adds to the overall sense of chaos in Nina’s mind and ours.

Some might be inclined to roll their eyes at the bun-head caricature that Nina first embodies, with her pink wardrobe and bad tween jewelry. But Nina is meant to be the "sweet girl" in this grim fable of Black Swan as Swan Lake: Black vs. White, Good vs. Evil – but there's no Yin and Yang here. One has to win, and without a chainsaw in sight, they manage to duel violently.

Unlike that of other thrillers, Black Swan’s horror lies in its simplicity and the characters’ self-affliction. Aronofsky and Portman manage to capture both the beauty and brutality of ballet, from the glamour of the stage to the cracking bones and nails behind the curtains. The gruesome horror builds slowly until it becomes painfully unwatchable – trust me, you'll never look at a nail file the same way again.

As a blind date, Black Swan didn't let me down. It's beautiful, intelligent, and fascinating. Would I see it again? Definitely.