Entertaining despite technical flaws.

Rating: 5/10 (6 December 2011)

Horror film? Variation on "All About Eve"? Upper class "The Wrestler"? Aronofsky's creepy tale of sanity loss in the pursuit of greatness has garnered all these reasonable speculations but all hit the mark less well than "David Cronenberg tribute." Nina's (not a great name for this character) hallucinations of physical deformity (fused toes) and real injury (back sores) hark back to Cronenberg's "The Fly" and "Videodrome." The creepy relationship between Barbara Hershey's mother and Natalie Portman's dancer strongly resemble the twin gynecologists in "Dead Ringers" but perhaps the better comparison is the mother-daughter team in "The Piano Teacher." When you steal from greats, being derivative is not a sin and Aronofsky should be credited rather than blamed for this. However, he should be blamed for the film's repetitive and nauseating's "Cloverfield" "shaky-cam" cinematography. We follow Natalie Portman across the Lincoln Center courtyard so many times audience-members begin to suspect to find a complex security pass in their purse. The club scene shot in multi-color strobe which precedes Nina's drug-driven detour from reality mirrors almost exactly a similar scene in "Basic Instinct." However if you can get over the claustrophobic close-ups and other visual shortcomings, a compelling horror story about trying to tell reality from fiction and largely failing (kind of like "Naked Lunch") underlies the precedings. Aronofsky manufactures some true shocks and doesn't compromise on the end. Bring your mother!