An intense, exhausting, brilliant, full-on, operatic, psychological horror

Rating: 9/10 (31 January 2011)

Black Swan is not really a ballet movie.
Nina (Natalie Portman) is a young dancer in a prestigious ballet company, obsessed, as artists often are, with the perfection of her craft, and seemingly also driven by that age-old dramatic staple, the overbearing and overprotective mother. When she is promoted to Prima and has to take on the dual role of darkness and innocence at the heart of Swan Lake, she is pushed by the egotistical and possibly predatory director (played by Vincent Cassel) into exploring a darker, more sexual, more aggressive side of her nature.
Darren Aronofsky has made films about brilliant obsessive types, reaching for perfection and being driven to the point of madness in the past. His latest shares a lot in common with his stunning low-budget debut "Pi". Black Swan may have the big money and a star at its centre, but Aronofsky has lost not a jot of his obsessive intensity.
No movie about ballet, with a melodramatic plot centred around a fragile girl pushed to her limits can avoid comparisons with the legendary ne plus ultra of this micro sub-species, "The Red Shoes". However, while they share a common subject, stylistically this is a very different and altogether scarier proposition. Channelling the arch Gothic thrill of Brian DePalma's Carrie, and a whole bunch of Dario Argento 1970s giallo chillers, along with the reality blurring bodily distortions of Cronenberg movies such as The Fly and Dead Ringers, Black Swan gradually builds to a fevered dream of madness and terror and doesn't let up till the credits roll.
So far, so unexpectedly, but entertainingly genre. But unlike many of its forbears, Aronofsky's picture is executed with exceptional art and precision. Close-up hand-held shooting keeping the frame tight in on every player, stripping away the artifice and closing in on the bone- crunching physical intensity of the ballet performances, or prowling the grimy backstage corridors, seeking out every darkened corner or artfully fractured mirror. There are fine performances from Cassel and particularly Barbara Hershey, as Nina's failed dancer mother, in a role that could easily have been grating and false. But at the heart of it all, and the making of the whole enterprise, is a heroically controlled performance from Natalie Portman, easily a career best. She runs the gamut of emotional states in a role which requires pushing them all to the extremes and yet she never hits a false note. Raw, honest, and totally empathetic, it's a miraculous achievement.
An intense, exhausting, brilliant, full-on, operatic, psychological horror. Black Swan is all these things; it's just not really a ballet movie.