Darren Aronofsky's fifth film is a throwback to the great psychological horrors of the past, specifically the likes of Nicolas Roeg's classic Don't Look Now and Stanley Kubrick's The Shining. Here he intelligently brings out the emotional and physical intensity of ballet (no, seriously) in much the same way as he exposed the literal and metaphorical batterings of wrestlers in The Wrestler.

In early scenes we see Natalie Portman's soft-spoken, timid ballerina Nina cracking her toes as she wakes from bed, and it smarts, she's torturing her own body to create something that, to the audience, is graceful and delicate. It's a weird contrast and one that is the through-line of the whole movie.

Like many psychological horrors this film is about duality, and it's a point the film isn't shy of hammering in time and time again. Vincent Cassel's director delivers a number of speeches stressing the differences between the white swan and the black swan, as they prepare to put on a new season's performance of Tchiakovsky's Swan Lake. Simply put, this film is about a director trying to encourage a performance out of their key cast member, but this struggle is played out from the point of view of that cast member and their fraught and unreliable mind delivers the film's scares.

Natalie Portman is undeniably fantastic as Nina, capturing a sweetness that borders on a darker side, an innocence that is equally as corrupt, a naivete that seems to be a careful facade masking underlying intelligence, jealously and a potentially scheming and covetous nature. Thus, once her dilemmas become actualised (on screen at least) it's all the more thrilling seeing these two sides of Portman carefully jostle with one another. The visualisation of this transformation is what provides the squirm inducing moments.

In much the same way as David Cronenberg did with classics such as The Fly and Scanners, it's all about something unknown lurking under the surface. Occasionally these sequences step into the bizarre, though I found it somewhat disappointing that the film didn't go all out at some points, whilst certain freaky sequences didn't quite work.

Portman is complimented by some good performances from the likes of Cassel, Mila Kunis and especially Barbara Hershey as her quite frankly terrifying, molly-coddling mother. In the end though this film is a two-hander, a duologue between an actress and her director and Aronofsky pulls from his entire back catalogue to make Black Swan his most accomplished overall work so far (though personally I prefer the ragged, slightly messy and ambitious romantic sci-fi The Fountain).

There are a number of flaws with the film, such as a very derivative use of horror conventions and the sense that sometimes you're just being played for a cheap-scare, and when they you scratch the surface of some of the film's ideas there's not much going on underneath beyond the obvious. However more so than any other film Aronofsky has made, this film is, bizarrely, an entertainment and Portman is compelling. Though you will still come out scratching your head as to why Aronofsky has signed up to direct the Wolverine sequel.

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