Hitchcock On Acid

Rating: 10/10 (12 June 2011)

Black Swan opens with a deranged and unsettling dream from the main character. She wakes up, but the movie never loses the grotesque and slightly sickening feeling of a nightmare. Darren Aronofsky creates a schizophrenic world full of demons lurking in the shadows, in the corner of the eye, and in the never ending depths of the mirror. But what makes this dark film so great is that it never forgets the Hitchcockian golden rule: Keep the audience entertained. And boy is it good at that.
Nina is a young adult who works at the ballet studio. This particular season is looking good for her, especially when she lands the lead role in the ballet Swan Lake. But there is something slightly off about Nina, and it is hard to place. She is in her early 20's and hasn't moved out of her mother's house yet. But more importantly, she seems to have never grown up. Nina sees the world through the eyes of a young girl wishing to be a princess, she is over emotional, and sexually frigid. Her pink room filled with stuffed animals and music boxes is hauntingly reminiscent of Norman Bates' bedroom.
When a new dancer joins the group, and seems to dance much more gracefully than Nina, things start to fall apart. Nina look-a-likes start to pass her by in dark alley ways, her troubled and disturbing relationship with her mother gets even worse, and demons creep on the edge of sight, being present enough to haunt the audience, but remain hidden and unknown. While many movies go for the cheap thrill and show their computer animated beasts, the monsters of Black Swan are more enduring and terrifying—because what we can't see is far worse than what we can.
Natalie Portman is gives her most demanding—and possibly best— performance as the tormented and child-like Nina. She handles the character with a mixture of frailty and darkness. Nina's fairytale view of the world is constantly being overruled by the harsh reality of the real world, but as she tries to get her head out of the clouds, the world starts falling apart around her. Although Mila Kunis is basically the poor-man's Emma Stone, she does a great job as the sexually promiscuous and free rival dancer. Barbara Hershey is fantastic as Nina's overbearing, and possibly psychotic mother, and her presence is made all the more unsettling because we don't know her (or any characters') history. She too tends to lurk in the shadows, at the edge of sight, like Nina's demons.
Darren Aronofsky is a master filmmaker. His camera flows through the film, capturing every emotion that runs through Nina's veins. Aronofsky easily creates a sense of terror mixed with beauty. Showing us the cruel and mean world of ballet dancers, how perfection and success can taunt a person, and—thrusting the audience into a winter terror-land—Aronofsky offers little warmth to this thriller. When he does give it, however, he engulfs us majestically. The film itself captures the essence of a ballet; beautiful from afar, but complete chaos and noise on stage. Eerily photographed by Mathew Libatique, Aronofsky's intriguing and erotic thriller is a masterpiece of cinema.
The great and sometimes ironic score by Clint Mansell really completes this movie. Taking elements from the score of Swan Lake, Mansell seamlessly transfers from beauty to terror. A score that is sometimes music, sometimes noises, he takes the horrors of the movie and implants them into his music, helping to further send the audience down that dark road where Nina lives.
Darren Aronofsky's wonderfully frightening and disturbed look at the world of a ballerina is a stunning, harsh, and beautiful film that takes the imagination to new heights. With great acting and fantastic imagery, this movie is not only one of the best this year, but the best in a long time.
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