A nightmarish masterpiece

Rating: 10/10 (9 January 2011)

Black Swan is a visual masterpiece, a disturbing character study, and a gut-wrenching psychological horror piece. In one of the best films of the year, Darren Aronofsky directs with a bold artistic vision, documenting the rapid mental breakdown of the paranoid and perfectionist ballerina Nina Sayers (Natalie Portman). In an Oscar-worthy performance, and certainly the performance of her career, Portman sheds her sweetheart attitude and travels to new depths of acting, at the same time that her character loses her innocence and descends into madness.
In fact, Black Swan abounds with such artistic parallels. It is a film about ballet, and moreover it is a ballet; it features over-the-top theatricality and uses the nightmarish music of Tchaikovsky's Swan Lake, the ballet around which the film is centered.
In Swan Lake, one dancer must portray both the innocent White Swan and her evil twin, the sensual Black Swan. The psychological duality of these roles parallels Nina's own duality, which she explores with devastating consequences. The doppelganger aspect of Swan Lake is also seen in the film, as Nina is haunted by her double, the free-spirited Lily (Mila Kunis), who becomes Nina's understudy and seems to embody her darker side.
As Nina struggles with the dual nature of her ballet role, she must deal with other issues as well, ranging from her strained relationship with her repressive mother (Barbara Hershey) to unwanted attentions from the ballet company's director (Vincent Cassel). Also suffering from an eating disorder, obsession, and paranoia, Nina bends under the immense pressure and begins to see grisly hallucinations that take a toll on her mental health.
But in a film with an unreliable protagonist, reality and hallucinations are often indistinguishable, and this is what makes the film fun. The viewer must judge whether Nina's perspective is accurate and whether certain events even happened. Thus Black Swan becomes a multilayered film with many possible interpretations.
This complexity is further enhanced by Aronofsky's clever manipulation of mirrors; there is a mirror in almost every scene. Mirrors are often associated with deception, desire for perfection, and duality, ideas that are all explored in the film. Moreover, small details such as the color of Nina's clothing illustrate the duality at the center of her struggle. Her change in wardrobe color choice, from light to dark, parallels her mental collapse and her psychological transformation from the pure White Swan to the evil Black Swan.
Symbolism and parallelism aside, Black Swan is an audacious declaration of Aronofsky's creativity. He constructs an unlikely blend of horror and ballet, mental illness and artistic devotion. These mismatched themes work surprisingly well together, and we soon realize that the music of Swan Lake does suit the atmosphere of a horror film.
A film like Black Swan is rare: it is as nightmarish as it is exquisite, as disturbing as it is beautiful. It explores not only the duality within every person but also the fine line between hallucinations and reality. The film takes us to intimate places with Nina and we cannot help but empathize with her, making the film, though over-the-top (and intentionally so), seem frighteningly real.