Black Swan Review

Natalie Portman will win an Oscar for this performance. Her unhinged emotional intensity, coupled with a ruthless physical transformation into a prima ballerina, makes her an inevitable red carpet victor. Built around this incredible central performance, the film is a mesmerising journey of mental collapse. It is darkly psychotic and inescapably gripping.

Portman plays a young ballerina struggling to deal with the immense pressures of her first leading role in Swan Lake. An abusive instructor, a talented rival dancer and the aging star she replaced in the spotlight all help push her to the brink of madness and beyond. Spiralling into terrifying hallucinations as opening night draws closer.

Director Darren Aronofsky has drawn unlikely comparisons between Black Swan and his previous masterpiece The Wrestler. Superficially there may seem little to connect the high art of Ballet with the brutish pratfalls of professional wrestling. However, there is a deep and surprising emotional connection between these two worlds. They share the same tragedy, of performers left physically and emotionally broken by the self-destructive sacrifice necessary for their craft.

The ballet community hasn’t responded particularly well to seeing some of its ugliest stereotypes on the big screen. However, whether the film’s character assassinations are accurate or deserved is irrelevant to its own undoubted success as a sublime work of filmmaking art.

Black Swan throbs and aches with a sinister sexual electricity. Vincent Cassel does fine work as a predatory ballet instructor, but of course it’s the film’s already infamous lesbian sex scenes which grab the erotic headlines. However, the passionate encounter between Portman and bitter rival dancer (Mila Kunis) is nothing like the exercise in adolescent wish fulfilment some may have expected.

The integration of the Swan Lake ballet movements into the films ominous and lurching soundtrack is seamless and effective. Aronofsky blends subtle special effects with gritty cinematography an equally deft touch to plunge the audience into an increasingly jarring and nightmarish world.

Black Swan is blessed with the kind of sophisticated suspense and sexual intrigue that would have made Alfred Hitchcock proud. It’s bleak, shocking, beautiful and intense.