Not just bad - Staggeringly, laughably, 'Howard the Duck' awful

Rating: 1/10 (8 December 2010)

Billed as a sexy physiological thriller, Black Swan is instead a comedy of sorts - albeit one where the audience laughed at the actors not with them. A thriller succeeds by creating a character you get to know and care about and then slowly 'tightening the screws' of suspense by subjecting them to ever more frightening and surprising plot developments (e.g.Psycho, The Shining, Memento).
But no one on either side of the screen gets to know or care about Natalie Portman as the Swan Queen. We first see her as a one of a company of ballet dancers technically proficient but emotionally challenged - a 20 something nervous schoolgirl. Unfortunately, Ms. Portman proved incapable of changing her expressions or projecting new emotions as experiences impacted upon her character. In the film's terms, Ms. Portman is a White Swan incapable of portraying a Black Swan - a fatal flaw since the movie is about her transformation.
Since neither the audience nor the other characters in the film care about her it is impossible to feel any real suspense. And so the heavily foreshadowed elements of the film which are supposed to convey 'thriller' just come across as ever more ridiculous magical realism - pretty to look at but without emotional content.
On the positive side, Vincent Cassel breathes life into the arrogant artistic director, Wynona Rider has a delightful cameo as the deranged prima ballerina, and the ballet mistress displays her back to show the audience what an actual ballerina's muscles look like.