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Darren Aronofsky's “Black Swan” is a full-bore melodrama, told with passionate intensity, gloriously and darkly absurd. It centers on a performance by Natalie Portman that is nothing short of heroic, and mirrors the conflict of good and evil in Tchaikovsky's ballet “Swan Lake.” It is one thing to lose yourself in your art. Portman's ballerina loses her mind.

Everything about classical ballet lends itself to excess. The art form is one of grand gesture, of the illusion of triumph over reality and even the force of gravity. Yet it demands from its performers years of rigorous perfectionism, the kind of physical and mental training that takes ascendancy over normal life. This conflict between the ideal and the reality is consuming Nina Sayers, Portman's character.

Her life has been devoted to ballet. Was that entirely her choice? Her mother, Erica ( Barbara Hershey ), was a dancer once, and now dedicates her life to her daughter's career. They share a small apartment that feels sometimes like a refuge, sometimes like a cell. They hug and chatter like sisters. Something feels wrong.

Nina dances in a company at New York's Lincoln Center, ruled by the autocratic Thomas Leroy ( Vincent Cassel ). The reach of his ego is suggested by his current season, which will “reimage” the classics.

Having cast off his former prima ballerina and lover, Beth MacIntyre ( Winona Ryder ), he is now auditioning for a new lead. “Swan Lake” requires the lead to play opposite roles. Nina is clearly the best dancer for the White Swan. But Thomas finds her too “perfect” for the Black Swan. She dances with technique, not feeling.

The film seems to be unfolding along lines that can be anticipated: There's tension between Nina and Thomas, and then Lily ( Mila Kunis ), a new dancer, arrives from the West Coast. She is all Nina is not: bold, loose, confident. She fascinates Nina, not only as a rival but even as a role model. Lily is, among other things, a clearly sexual being, and we suspect Nina may never have been on a date, let alone slept with a man. For her, Lily presents a professional challenge and a personal rebuke.

Thomas, the beast, is well known for having affairs with his dancers. Played with intimidating arrogance by Cassel, he clearly has plans for the virginal Nina. This creates a crisis in her mind: How can she free herself from the technical perfection and sexual repression enforced by her mother, while remaining loyal to their incestuous psychological relationship?

No backstage ballet story can be seen without " The Red Shoes " (1948) coming into mind. If you've never seen it of course eventually you will. In the character of Thomas, Aronofsky and Cassel evoke Boris Lermontov ( Anton Walbrook ), the impresario in that film, whose autocratic manner masks a deep possessiveness. And in Nina, there is a version of Moira Shearer's ingenue, so driven to please.

“Black Swan” will remind some viewers of Aronofsky's previous film, " The Wrestler ." Both show singleminded professionalism in the pursuit of a career, leading to the destruction of personal lives. I was reminded also of Aronofsky's brilliant debut with " Pi " (1998), about a man driven mad by his quest for the universal mathematical language. For that matter, his " The Fountain " (2007) was about a man who seems to conquer time and space. Aronofsky's characters make no little plans.

The main story supports of “Black Swan” are traditional: backstage rivalry, artistic jealousy, a great work of art mirrored in the lives of those performing it. Aronofsky drifts eerily from those reliable guidelines into the mind of Nina. She begins to confuse boundaries. The film opens with a dream, and it becomes clear that her dream life is contiguous with her waking one. Aronofsky and Portman follow this fearlessly where it takes them.

Portman's performance is a revelation from this actress who was a 13-year-old charmer in " Beautiful Girls " (1996). She has never played a character this obsessed before, and never faced a greater physical challenge (she prepared by training for 10 months). Somehow she goes over the top and yet stays in character: Even at the extremes, you don't catch her acting. The other actors are like dance partners holding her aloft. Barbara Hershey provides a perfectly calibrated performance as a mother whose love is real, whose shortcomings are not signaled, whose own perfectionism has all been focused on the creation of her daughter.

The tragedy of Nina, and of many young performers and athletes, is that perfection in one area of life has led to sacrifices in many of the others. At a young age, everything becomes focused on pleasing someone (a parent, a coach, a partner), and somehow it gets wired in that the person can never be pleased. One becomes perfect in every area except for life itself.

It's traditional in many ballet-based dramas for a summing-up to take place in a bravura third act. “Black Swan” has a beauty. All of the themes of the music and life, all of the parallels of story and ballet, all of the confusion of reality and dream come together in a grand exhilaration of towering passion. There is really only one place this can take us, and it does. If I were you, I wouldn't spend too much time trying to figure out exactly what happens in practical terms. Lots of people had doubts about the end of "The Red Shoes," too. They were wrong, but they did.

Roger Ebert

Roger Ebert was the film critic of the Chicago Sun-Times from 1967 until his death in 2013. In 1975, he won the Pulitzer Prize for distinguished criticism.

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Film Credits

Black Swan (2010)

Rated R for strong sexual content, disturbing violent images, language and some drug use

108 minutes

Andrew Heinz
Mark Heyman
John McLaughlin

Directed by

Darren Aronofsky

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Bracingly intense, passionate, and wildly melodramatic, Black Swan glides on Darren Aronofsky's bold direction -- and a bravura performance from Natalie Portman.

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Review: black swan.

Black Swan is Showgirls stripped bare of its camp affections, Suspiria with a pretense to realism, Repulsion for our J-horror-addled times.

Darren Aronofsky’s Black Swan begins in dreams, with the gorgeous ballerina ingénue Nina (Natalie Portman) starring in her own twisted version of Swan Lake and awakening a little fucked up herself. The pitter patter of the little ballerina feet that fills the soundtrack to this menacingly sweet reverie, a sound that would seem to continue unabated for the rest of the film, is Aronofsky’s warped riff on the fava bean-hankering Hannibal Lecter’s flicking tongue—and like Friday the 13th ’s kill-kill-kill theme, it heralds trouble. The sound is also a symptom of the same type of lunacy—accurately diagnosed as monomania by critic Nick Davis—that grips all of Aronofsky’s characters and, at the same time, characterizes this preternaturally talented filmmaker’s frenetic style.

Black Swan is Showgirls stripped bare of its camp affections, Suspiria with a pretense to realism, Repulsion for our J-horror-addled times. It’s also Aronofsky’s The Company , an occasion for the filmmaker to reflect on his own artistic process, elegant and inelegant in equal measures, though it’s half as assured—visually, thematically, emotionally—as Robert Altman’s gorgeously complex doodle. Preposterous as it is, Black Swan is still nowhere near as ludicrous as The Fountain , and yet it’s a less rewarding vision because the filmmaker risks infinitely less with it, moving further away from Nina the closer she pirouettes toward madness.

“There’s always someone younger and hungrier coming down the stairs after you,” says Gina Gershon’s Cristal Connors in Showgirls . Aronofsky sympathizes with the mistreatment of female performers, how easily they fall in and out of favor and the lengths they go to in order to stay in fashion, but his empathy doesn’t run deep—at least not as deeply as Paul Verhoeven’s in Showgirls , or even Joseph L. Mankiewicz’s in All About Eve . Though it might seem provocative that the troubled Winona Ryder was cast as Beth MacIntyre, the prima ballerina in Thomas Leroy’s (Vincent Cassel) company who must move aside so Nina’s star can rise, and the heavily plastic-surgeried Barbara Hershey as Nina’s mother, who sacrificed her career as a painter long ago in order to cultivate her daughter’s talent, appearances can be deceiving—like everything in Black Swan .

Ryder and Hershey, like Mila Kunis, as Nina’s foxy frenemy Lilly, seem to have been cast more for their black hair and cat-like eyes—for seeming as if they could be confused for Portman, even if only from a distance. This choice becomes just another facet of the film’s punishingly literal and reductive obsession with motifs of doublings: Every mirror, every painting (don’t miss that ink blot on Thomas’s wall!), even the surface of bathtub water in one scene, is meant to be read as a window into Nina’s soul, the split between her “white” and “black” selves—but these stylistic gesticulations achieve visual symmetry at the same time as they shun insight. The screenplay by Mark Heyman, Andrew Heinz, and John J. McLaughlin, which is rife with bad psychologizing and even worse dialogue (“The real work will be your metamorphosis into her evil twin!” barks Thomas as if he were instructing the Bride of Frankenstein), but Aronofsky could have fixed that: Rather than downplay the script’s inherent dumbness or make a balls-out psychedelic spectacle of the thing, he settles for embellishment of a particularly indifferent, transparent sort, more Orphan than Requiem for a Dream .

Aronofsky makes trashy what David Lynch made poignant in Mulholland Drive (one film’s girl-on-girl sex scene is a haunting expression of what a woman can never have, in the other it’s a lurid representation of the shameful things a woman has to do in order to succeed), though to be fair, Aronofsky isn’t going for poignancy here: All he wants is draaaama . But Lynch achieved both, so why can’t he? If Aronofsky doesn’t it’s because he doesn’t trust the courage of his convictions. Like Nina, who’s lectured throughout by the sweater-around-the-neck-wearing Thomas about needing to “let go,” Aronofsky seems torn between playing the film’s narrative straight or going absolutely batshit crazy. This push-pull tension is interestingly self-reflective (you may ask, “What does Aronofsky see when he looks into a mirror?”) and may connect with Nina’s crisis, but what do all of Black Swan ’s stylistic hiccups actually have to do with Nina?

Aronofsky appears to be diagnosing in Nina some psychological syndrome that’s part Stendhal, part Gypsy Rose Lee. As the pressure mounts for her to dance the part of the black swan in Swan Lake as sincerely as she plays the white one, she grows progressively mad, imagining feathers bursting from her fingers, wings from her back, and her mirror reflection teasing her with the coyness and devilishness she seems incapable of expressing. Aronofsky wants to articulate the strain of the artistic process, but he only fixates on the physical: We get close-ups of muscular bodies stretching and contorting, bruised toes, a tensed diaphragm releasing some pent-up air, but we don’t feel a thing for Nina’s psychic stress as she literally and figuratively metamorphoses into the black swan because we never get a sense for why she desires the part so ardently in the first place. Which is to say nothing of the fact that Aronofsky doesn’t seem to care very much for the actual art of dance. Quick: Name a scene in the film that is as revealing, ecstatic, and reveres the process of performance as profoundly as Naomi Watts’s audition scene from Mulholland Drive ?

Like the strange noises that clog the film’s soundtrack throughout, which are memorably synced with the flashing lights that whiz by Nina whenever she peers through the reflective black abyss of subway windows, you never get a sense that her madness even belongs to her. But this is Aronofsky’s problem, not Portman’s: He boxes her character into corners with stylistic flourishes that don’t even remotely suggest the symptoms of even the fantasy psychosis the script concocts for her. Though it looks like The Wrestler , Black Swan , with its visually and sonically over-accented flourishes, behaves more like a Platinum Dunes joint. It doesn’t even merit comparison to Requiem for a Dream because at least in that hellride one felt an empathetic connection between Aronofsky’s style and the suffering of his characters.

Perhaps Black Swan , like Swan Lake , is meant to be seen itself as an opera, a fusion of synergic sound and movement—albeit a very filmic one. Aronofsky crafts the Dardenneian compositions, cinematographer Matthew Libatique dials their dreariness up, editor Andrew Weisblum sets an erratic tempo, and Portman and her fellow ballerinas provide the flailing—however infrequent—limbs, all rhymed to a predictably clangorous score by Clint Mansell. Like the recent Amer , a collision of psychologically charged signs and more signs, it doesn’t lack for fierceness, but it strains for meaning. The heightened sense of drama is apt, yes, but the overall effect is ostentatiously calculated, ill-fitting, and emotionally aloof, always for our benefit and almost never symptomatic of its protagonist’s living nightmare.

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Ed Gonzalez is the co-founder of Slant Magazine . A member of the New York Film Critics Circle, his writing has appeared in The Village Voice , The Los Angeles Times , and other publications.

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Entertainment

‘Black Swan’: Unlike any ballet movie you’ve ever seen

A review of Darren Aronofsky's dark "Black Swan," starring Natalie Portman, Mila Kunis and Barbara Hershey.

Turn beauty inside out, and you just might find horror. That’s the thinking behind Darren Aronofsky’s mesmerizing “Black Swan,” a ballet movie so majestically lurid it almost creates its own genre; a backstage melodrama set in a dark hall of mirrors.

Nina (Natalie Portman), a baby-voiced blank slate of a young woman, is a soloist in a New York ballet company who dreams of dancing the lead role of the swan-turned-woman in “Swan Lake” — literally, as the movie opens with her dream performance in which Tchaikovsky’s music swirls around her like a malevolent dance partner. Waking in her girlish pink bedroom, she’s a little frightened by the intensity of her dream, but it’s nothing compared with the waking nightmare in which she lives: a smothering mother, Erica (Barbara Hershey), with whom Nina shares a claustrophobically dark apartment (note the empty bird cage on the piano, and the feathery scarves Nina wears); a demanding, temperamental swan of an artistic director, Thomas (Vincent Cassel), who gives Nina the part she wants but constantly carps that she’s not good enough; a saucy, careless rival named Lily (Mila Kunis) who dances with the ease and verve that Nina lacks; and a mysterious case of what looks like ballet-themed stigmata, which finally reveals its true nature in a strange yet gloriously beautiful “Swan Lake” solo.

This is creepy stuff, leaving “The Red Shoes” far behind in its focus on ballet’s dark side. Though there are a few lovely dance sequences (danced mostly — and surprisingly well — by Portman, with a double for complex pointe work), Aronofsky’s not at all interested in celebrating the art. Instead, he finds grotesqueries in it, such as a close-up on a ballerina’s foot, hoisting up on pointe as if the effort might break it. Portman, looking wispy and skeletal, drifts through the movie like a lost child, controlled by her mother at home (Erica removes her daughter’s earrings and clips her nails, as if she’s a life-size doll) and Thomas at the studio, while Lily grins wickedly from the sidelines.

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Not a pretty picture, but just try to look away as the plot thickens and curdles. Hershey’s Erica seems to spiral into a “Carrie”-flavored ballet-mom madness; Winona Ryder’s Beth (aging prima ballerina/prima donna at the company) looks on Nina with eyes so cold they’d need warming up to be frozen. And Thomas and Lily become “Swan Lake’s” evil Baron von Rothbart in turn, luring Nina into an erotic, dangerous grown-up world utterly unlike her own squelched, frightened one. Through it all, Tchaikovsky’s music plays like a hypnotic dirge, and Matthew Libatique’s camerawork finds infinite levels of dark menace in basement dressing rooms and subway platforms, with mirrors at every corner reflecting Nina’s pale face back at her.

As the movie whirls on, are we seeing Nina, or her reflection, or her dream? Nevermind; the orchestra’s warming up and the dance has begun, regardless of whether there’s blood on the floor.

Moira Macdonald: 206-464-2725 or [email protected]

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Dark Beauty

A tense thriller, with ballerinas.

January-February 2011

In <i>Black Swan</i>, Natalie Portman's character dances the role of the Swan Queen and her dark rival in <i>Swan Lake</i>. Here, Portman as the White Swan.

[extra:Extra]

View a clip from Black Swan in which Natalie Portman's character asks for the role of Swan Queen

In the new film Black Swan, Natalie Portman ’03 plays Nina, a prima ballerina in New York who dances the Swan Queen in Tchaikovsky’s Swan Lake as her first starring role. That means portraying both a White Swan who radiates innocence, sweetness, and light, and a darker Black Swan—seductive, dangerous, and evil. An overprotected, driven perfectionist, Nina readily takes to the white swan, but must endure a kind of personal purgatory to claim the dark side of both the ballet role and her personality.

Lily (Mila Kunis), another beautiful dancer who becomes Nina’s friend and rival, catalyzes this metamorphosis. In the hands of tenebrous film director Darren Aronofsky ’91 ( The Wrestler, Requiem for a Dream ), the story becomes one of almost unrelieved tension, a thriller that probes psychological, artistic, and even spiritual allegories as Nina finds herself in the midst of what is tantamount to a nervous breakdown. Black Swan’ s most characteristic shot is a close-up of Portman’s captivating face, her eyes flickering with anxiety. Even the final scene sends the audience home with unresolved questions to ponder.

Aronofsky began to consider this story 15 years ago. In fact, “It all started with my sister, who was a ballet dancer when I was a kid,” he says; he witnessed her grueling training regime. When he completed his M.F.A. at the American Film Institute Conservatory, he was already thinking about making two companion films, one set in the world of pro wrestling, one in that of professional ballet. “Some call wrestling the lowest of art forms, and some call ballet the highest of art forms, yet there is something elementally the same,” Aronofsky explains. “Mickey Rourke as a wrestler was going through something very similar to Natalie Portman as a ballerina. They’re both artists who use their bodies to express themselves and they’re both threatened by physical injury, because their bodies are the only tools they have for expression. What was interesting for me was to find these two connected stories in what might appear to be unconnected worlds.” In Black Swan, “We wanted to be tense, and to make a thriller,” he explains. “To have the horrific elements contrasting with the beauty and sexuality of ballet made for an interesting construction.”

Long before the screenplay was ready, Aronofsky had decided that Portman was the right actress for the lead. The two had met for coffee in Times Square more than 10 years ago to talk about the idea. Portman studied ballet as a child and has continued to dance to stay in shape; she told the director that she had always wanted to play a dancer. To prepare for the film, she undertook 10 months of intense physical training that consumed five hours a day, including swimming, weight lifting, and other cross-training, as well as intensive dance work with choreographer Benjamin Millepied, a principal dancer with the New York City Ballet; in the end, she danced 90 percent of the film’s ballet scenes herself. (American Ballet Theatre soloist Sarah Lane performed some exacting point work and turns as Portman’s double.) “It’s incredibly challenging, trying to pick up ballet at 28,” Portman says. “Even if you’ve taken dance lessons before, you just don’t realize how much goes into it at the elite level. Every small gesture has to be so specific and so full of lightness and grace.”

At the start of the film, Nina is a “bunhead”—dancers’ unflattering term for a ballerina so obsessively devoted to her art that she has no life outside it. A Signet Society member and psychology concentrator at Harvard, Portman saw Nina as “being caught in a cycle of obsession and compulsion. The positive side of that for artists and dancers is that by focusing so hard you can become a virtuoso, but then there’s a much darker side, an unhealthy side, in which you can become completely lost. That’s where I had to take Nina.”

Music figures heavily in establishing Black Swan’ s atmosphere of foreboding. “It became clear that this was a tremendously musical film,” says Robert Kraft ’76, president of Fox Music, who was involved in the relevant decisions for the Fox Searchlight Pictures release. “You have Tchaikovsky’s incredible ballet music and a fantastic original underscore written by [English composer] Clint Mansell. I was in London with Darren for every minute of the orchestral recording. It was glorious. It sounded as beautiful as I had dreamed.” Mansell explains that he wanted the Swan Lake music to haunt Nina during her stormy passage. “Tchaikovsky’s score is so wonderfully complex,” he says. “It tells the story in every note. But modern film scores are more subdued, more minimalist if you will, so I had to almost deconstruct the ballet.” Aronofsky adds, “Clint took Tchaikovsky’s masterpiece and turned it into scary movie music.”

The dark beauty of the Russian master’s score infuses Black Swan with its magic. Filled with themes of ego and alter ego, images of mirrors, and paradoxes of the psyche, Black Swan itself explores aspects of the art that created it. “There are lots of ideas about the artistic process in the film,” Aronofsky says. “There’s a struggle between control and letting go. In any craft, you have to learn to do both.”

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The Portrayal of OCD in Darren Aronofsky's 'Black Swan' - Beyond its body horror and psychedelic visuals, the 2010 film tells a story of living with obsessive-compulsive disorder

'Black Swan' Ending Explained: The Price of Perfection

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The Big Picture

Black Swan delves into the dark side of striving for perfection in the ballet world.
The film portrays the intense mental health struggles faced by a ballerina chasing success.
Nina's descent into madness blurs reality and fantasy while exploring the price of perfection.

Tales of creative people with an unhealthy ambition to be the best in their field is not a new concept. Whether in the magician rivalry of The Prestige , the single-minded determination of a jazz drummer in Whiplash , the commitment of a Hollywood actor in Birdman , or dueling cellists in The Perfection , Hollywood is inundated with stories of obsessive creatives. And with good reason. Stories about the pursuit of perfection provide the canvas for deep character studies while also serving as a cautionary tale about chasing success. With its story of female rivalry, the overpowering desire for artistic excellence, and its effect on mental health, 2010's Black Swan , which has just hit Netflix, is another notable entry in the category. It's also one of the best. Black Swan weaponizes beautiful renditions of ballet performances to deconstruct the link between identity, sexuality, and artistry. As beautiful as it is terrifying, Black Swan utilizes its open-ended conclusion to let viewers make up their own minds about what actually happened to Nina.

Nina is a talented but unstable ballerina on the verge of stardom. Pushed to the breaking point by her artistic director and a seductive rival, Nina's grip on reality slips, plunging her into a waking nightmare.

What Is 'Black Swan' About?

The film revolves around Nina Sayers ( Natalie Portman ), a ballerina in the New York City ballet company who desperately wants both starring roles in the company's opening season performance of Tchaikovsky's Swan Lake . Faced with pressure from herself as well as her overprotective mother ( Barbara Hershey ), she pushes her body to the brink to achieve her best performance. But when promising newcomer Lily ( Mila Kunis ) joins the company, Nina is faced with the devastating possibility of being replaced. She trains harder than ever, though her desire for perfection begins to have unforeseen consequences. As Nina becomes obsessive about her performance and pushes her mind to its limits, she is haunted by hallucinations that make her question what is real and what is the product of her fracturing mind.

It’s not the first time that Portman has played an obsessive artist; she also appeared as the traumatized pop star Celeste in Vox Lux and the actress Elizabeth Berry in May December . However, her performance in Black Swan is unique because Nina’s desire to succeed is purely based on her own ambitions. Nina doesn’t see ballet as a means to gain celebrity status, as the art in itself is satisfying. Black Swan examines how Nina is her own greatest enemy as she digs herself in deeper when she tries to achieve perfection.

‘Black Swan’ Is a Dark Psychological Horror Dressed Up in a Tutu

On the surface, Black Swan can seem like a drama about the cutthroat world of ballet. However, to reduce it to such simple terms would be doing the film a great disservice. The psychological horror film is a master class in crafting character-based tension and dread, with each scene building to a crescendo as captivating as it is horrifying. Director Darren Aronofsky isn't afraid to get up close and personal with his messy characters and the result is a fascinating commentary on mental health, sexual repression, and the price of success. Along with a beautiful and haunting score from Clint Mansell and killer performances from leading ladies Portman ( who won an Oscar for the role ), Hershey, and Kunis, the film manages to deliver a tightly paced rollercoaster ride guaranteed to leave you breathless after it fades to white.

Black Swan begins with a premise that's simple enough, but it's not long before its narrative twists and turns, daring viewers to follow through the distorted path it travels. As the plot grows darker and Nina begins to question what is real and what is imagined, so does the audience. So what really happened at the end of Black Swan ? Let's take a look.

Nina's Obsession Starts to Manifest in Body Horror

The night before she is set to perform, Nina becomes convinced that Lily is going to take her place. Her paranoia and mental strain cause her to hallucinate that she's physically turning into the role of Odile, the Black Swan, complete with red eyes and black feathers protruding from bird-like skin. But her confidence and passion for the roles of Odile and Odette, the White Swan, causes the play's artistic director Thomas ( Vincent Cassel ) to finally award both roles to her. After playing Odette, Nina begins to lose her grip on reality when she goes backstage and finds Lily prepping to go on stage as Odile. Horrified and desperate to keep the coveted role to herself, Nina confronts Lily, and they're involved in a violent altercation in which Nina stabs Lily with a shard of a broken mirror, killing her.

It’s hardly the first time that Aronofsky has utilized body horror to reach emotional truths. The traumatizing ending of his 2017 film mother! lamented on the relationship between an artist and his muse through the lens of a home invasion thriller; his most recent film The Whale examined a self-destructive man’s search for fulfillment. While these films could be accused of being emotionally manipulative, Black Swan succeeds because of Nina’s relatability. The pureness of Nina’s intentions makes it even more shocking when she reveals the darker “black swan” aspect of her personality. The film reveals that even good people have a dark side.

How Does 'Black Swan' End?

Nina performing Swan Lake on stage in 'Black Swan'

Nina hides Lily's body and readies herself to go back on stage, but she is shocked and confused to find Lily standing in the doorway — alive. After all, the remnants of the broken mirror are still present, but Lily isn't injured. It's here that we see that the glass shard from their fight isn't protruding from Lily like we initially saw through Nina's point of view. It's in Nina . It turns out that Nina hallucinated the fight with (and subsequent murder of) Lily, and actually stabbed herself while in the throes of a psychotic episode. But this doesn't stop Nina from performing the role she's worked so hard to attain. Bleeding, she returns to the stage to perform the last act of the show.

The intensity of the strenuous performance rises and rises until the ballet's ending scene where Odette throws herself off a cliff. As Nina is falling through the air towards the mattress waiting below, the audience erupts into applause as Thomas and her fellow dancers crowd around her to congratulate her on a phenomenal performance — right as they see the blood blooming from the wound in her stomach. Thomas immediately calls for help, but Nina isn't in distress. "I felt it," she says, wide-eyed. "Perfect. It was perfect." The screen then fades to white, leaving it uncertain if Nina succumbed to her wounds or not.

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It's a bold ending, for sure. Is Nina going to pull through, or are we witnessing her dying moments? On one hand, the fade to white could symbolize Nina walking towards the light as she dies from her stab wound ; or, perhaps it's Aronofsky's way of showing us that Nina has now so completely disappeared into the role of the White Swan that there's no turning back. That Nina and the White Swan have become permanently fused together, unable to be separated. It doesn't seem to matter much to Nina either way because she got exactly what she wanted — achieving the ballet perfection that she so longed and trained for. Black Swan is unique in its feminist perspective. Although Nina has convinced herself that Thomas is “brilliant,” it’s evident that his demanding nature crosses the line into abuse. Thomas objectifies his dancers and only views them as a means to achieve his art; he only begins to notice Nina when she unleashes the dark side of her personality. While Nina's main enemy is herself, Cassel's Thomas is a reminder of the patriarchal pressures thrust on women.

What Is the Meaning Behind 'Black Swan's Ending?

Nina, staring into a mirror at herself with blood red eyes in Black Swan.

Whichever side you fall on, the ending raises plenty of other questions. After all, with Nina as an incredibly unreliable narrator, we have to wonder what other scenes, encounters, and conversations in the film were actually her hallucinations. For example, just how much of Nina's relationship with Lily was a product of her psychosis? Judging by Lily's genuine congratulation of Nina at the end of the film, it's probably safe to say that Lily had no idea about Nina's obsession with her. The adversarial relationship seems to be decidedly one-sided. But regardless of the women's friendship or rivalry, the real antagonist of the film isn't Nina or Lily; it's mental illness .

Black Swan takes great pains to show the mental and physical toll that Nina's single-minded pursuit of ballet perfection takes on her. From refusing to eat the celebration cake that her mother buys her and purging to maintain her ballerina weight, we're a witness to her food guilt as well as her bulimic tendencies . Combined with her performance anxiety, stress from living with an overprotective mother, and hints at self-harm, her mental health struggles have a large hand in contributing to Nina's psychosis that she experiences throughout the movie. Nina makes some questionable choices that she alone is responsible for, but she's also a victim, a prisoner of the ferocious cycle of mental illness.

While perfection can mean different things to different people, Nina's arc — and the film as a whole — shows that the pursuit of perfection doesn't come without consequences. After all, achieving excellence can be gratifying, but chasing it can be deadly.

Black Swan is available to stream on Max in the U.S.

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Movie Review: Black Swan a Gruesome, Masterful Horror Movie--About Ballet!

Review in a Hurry: Challenged to tap into her dark side, a perfectionist ballerina (Natalie Portman) becomes increasingly lost in a waking nightmare of all her neuroses. Director Darren Aronofsky's latest genre-bender may be talked about as awards-bait, but such conversations obscure the fact that Black Swan mostly plays like a full-on horror movie, with more genuinely earned scares than recent releases which wear the genre on their sleeves.

VIDEO: Mila and Natalie at the Black Swan premiere

The Bigger Picture: "Thriller" is what movies with sophisticated aspirations call themselves when they don't want to be dragged down into the perceived "horror" gutter. But make no mistake--this is not some suspense-flick in which a guy with a knife chases Natalie Portman. Rather, it's a full on mental meltdown depicted with terrifying subjectivity, comparable to Roman Polanski's Repulsion.

Numerous critics will likely also make comparisons to David Cronenberg (The Fly, A History of Violence), inasmuch as the movie deals with body imagery and the sometimes gruesome modification of same.

But this obscures the fact that it's been an Aronofsky issue from day one. From the head-drilling in Pi, the diet drugs and arm amputation in Requiem for a Dream, the steroids in The Wrestler, to the transformation of Rachel Weisz via cancer into a tree in The Fountain, every one of his films has in some way dealt with the mutilation of the body in order to attain an imagined perfection. (Which would have actually made him ideal for a Robocop remake, if one absolutely has to be done.)

Portman's Nina is an up and coming dancer who covets the lead role in her company's revisionist production of Swan Lake. She has her technique down pat, though there's also the issue of an OCD compulsion of scratching herself until she bleeds, possibly exacerbated by the demands of her hardline ex-ballerina mother (Barbara Hershey), with whom she shares a small New York flat.

Ballet director Thomas Leroy (Vincent Cassel) doesn't make things easier--using a totally unprofessional approach to get his point across (dude has apparently never heard the words sexual and harassment together in a sentence), he makes clear that he knows Nina has the skills for the part but possibly not the passion.

Especially since the dual lead roles of white swan and black swan require both control and uninhibited emotion. She must be able, he tells her, to totally lose herself in the role.

This she does, but with terrifying results. As we, the viewers, get sucked into her reality, we wonder if fellow dancer Lilly (Mila Kunis) is trying to undermine her, or seduce her, or is a completely innocuous friend. And to what extent retiring star Beth (Winona Ryder) has it out for her...or is similarly delusional. Plus, the scars that appear on her body: Are they the result of more obsessive scratching, or an actual transformation of the flesh?

Aronofsky's portrayal of what ensues isn't meant to be taken literally, but as a representation of the fears and insecurities that accompany the perfectionism of being in the spotlight. In the process, he delivers more genuine jump-scares than any other horror sequel or remake you've seen this year.

The 180--a Second Opinion: Oscar voters may find this too scary for their tastes, while horror fans may rebel at the notion of having to watch ballet. Their loss, in both cases.

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Black Swan Movie Review

A modern-day fairy tale that's freaky, sexy, and downright divine.

natalie portman and vincetn cassel in the black swan

The beauty of ballet and the psychology of horror are an inspired mix—think The Red Shoes meets Hitchcock—in the audacious thriller Black Swan. As the driven ballerina Nina, glorious Natalie Portman has the role of a lifetime: She pliés gracefully, shatters emotionally, and boasts the kind of swan-like neck that makes you momentarily wonder if she missed her true calling.

Still living with her overbearing mother (Barbara Hershey), the technically perfect but emotionally fragile Nina finally wins the lead in Tchaikovsky's Swan Lake . Sublime as the virginal Swan Queen, she has more trouble with the role's other half, the lustful Black Swan.

French actor Vincent Cassel is wonderfully seductive as the manipulative artistic director who dares Nina to tap into her sexuality. Uptight and plagued with doubts about her ability to tantalize the audience, she is tormented by her understudy, Lily (Mila Kunis), a sensual dancer who stalks and undermines Nina—or does she? Even as our sympathy grows for Nina, we wonder how much of it is her own paranoia. Where are those cuts on her back coming from? Why does her mother guard her so closely? Maybe Nina is possessed by something more demonic than ambition.

But the film's true virtuoso is director Darren Aronofsky ( The Wrestler ), whose camerawork is as soaring as a dancer's grand jeté, gliding around Nina's troubled psyche, capturing gorgeous dance sequences, and lingering on bloody toes forced into pointe shoes. Soon, the movie's supernatural details grab hold: Did the eyes in that painting just move? Who or what is turning out the lights?

By the end, Nina's quest for perfection—and Portman's blazing performance—will leave you breathless.

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Search Help Home > Movies > Black Swan

READER REVIEWS

R — for strong sexual content, disturbing violent images, language and some drug use Darren Aronofsky Natalie Portman, Mila Kunis, Winona Ryder, Sebastian Stan, Vincent Cassel 110 minutes

Drama, Suspense/Thriller

Mike Medavoy, Arnold W. Messer, Brian Oliver, Scott Franklin

Distributor

Fox Searchlight

Release Date

Dec 3, 2010

Release Notes

Official website.

www.BlackSwan2010.com

I n The Wrestler , Darren Aronofsky crafted a battering ode to male masochism, to the notion that one is truly, ecstatically alive on the brink of self-obliteration. And now, for the perfect insanity-inducing double bill, comes that film’s female counterpart, Black Swan .

The protagonist is Nina, a New York ballerina played (and largely danced) by Natalie Portman. She is still, in essence, a girl: sexually immature, living with an infantilizing mother (Barbara Hershey), surrounded in her pink bedroom by stuffed animals. She’s also a serial puker who scratches herself until she bleeds, a spirit in limbo. Nina is a candidate to play the Swan Queen in Tchaikovsky’s Swan Lake, but her company’s artistic director (Vincent Cassel) maintains she’s suited only for half the double role. She is the very embodiment of the innocent White Swan, who kills herself for love. But for the dark, demonic twin, Nina is sadly lacking in life experience. Like a Method-acting guru, he lectures her on letting go, losing herself, surrendering completely to her sexuality.

Black Swan dramatizes that surrender and its overpowering side effects, and it plays like a Roman Polanski remake of Showgirls with dollops of other Gothic/Grand Guignol filmmakers: David Lynch (life’s a dream), David Cronenberg (life’s a dream that makes icky things sprout from your flesh), Brian De Palma (life’s a voyeuristic tracking shot), and even that Italian giallo maestro Dario Argento (life’s a dark mirror that will shatter and slash you). The camera follows about a foot behind Nina’s slender neck as the settings change and doppelgängers pop up left and right. The movie’s epitaph could be Double, double toil and trouble.

Although Nina tells the director that her goal is perfection, she doesn’t really mean artistic perfection. In The Company, Robert Altman moved back and forth between physical (and emotional) punishment and sublime ballets, but Aronofsky isn’t remotely interested in celebrating the Dance. Black Swan is full of scary-looking emaciated women, their dark hair severely pulled back, twisting and cracking their limbs and toespuppets of a tyrannical male deity. Even before Nina begins to unravel, the dances are shot by a camera that seems to be shuddering in horror.

Aronofsky has one overriding aim: to get past the blood-brain barrier and give you a drug experience. In his first feature, Pi, an obsession with a mathematical equation caused a stroke, while pills and smack dictated the fractured syntax of Requiem for a Dream . In The Fountain, he even made love a lethal intoxicant. Aronofsky is enough of a virtuoso to bring that aesthetic off, but it’s a painfully constricted vision, and, like most drug experiences, it leaves little behind but a hangover. At their worst, his films suggest that there’s a thin line between the hypnotic and the stupefying.

Portman gives the kind of performance that wins awards, largely because you’re so aware of her sacrifices to play the part. She looks as if she trained hard, and, for an actress, she dances wellalthough not brilliantly or distinctively enough to convince you that the company director would single her out. Toward the end of Black Swan, her face is all bone and hollows, like a shrunken head; it comes as a relief to gaze (too briefly) on the full, rounded features of Mila Kunis as Nina’s insinuating, fake-solicitous rival. Meanwhile, Hershey’s tight face emblemizes another, more Hollywood brand of female insecurity and masochism. Aronofsky cast Winona Ryder as the aging prima ballerina whom Nina replaces, and I couldn’t help but think he was exploiting her reputation as an increasingly unstable ingenue who crashed and burned. The movie is full of casualtiesthey could all win awards.

Black Swan is crushingly obvious from its first frame to its exultant final whiteout, with poor Cassel having to utter variations of the same exhortation in every scene. (When he directs Nina to go home and touch herself, Aronofsky makes sure we see the giant stuffed bunny near her bed.) But this is, no doubt about it, a tour de force, a work that fully lives up to its director’s ambitions. It takes a long time to purge Tchaikovsky from your head: You exit, pursued by a swan. — David Edelstein

Black Swan Ending, Explained

For the lovers of fairy tales , ‘Swan Lake’ plays like a dream. The grace of ballet and the heartbreaking story of Odette makes for an overwhelming experience, when done right. For a ballet dancer, it is one of the dream roles, and also, one of the most challenging ones. Because it is not just the White Swan that they have to bring to life on stage, it is also her evil twin, Odile, who must be allowed to run free.

To inhabit these polar opposite personalities, to have Odette’s vulnerability along with Odile’s sensuality, is exhausting. It can be physically as well as mentally trying, and this is what made Darren Aronofsky choose it as the centre of his protagonist’s downward spiralling psychology. Natalie Portman stars in this psychological thriller as a ballerina who has to tear through her White Swan personality to get to the Black Swan. If you haven’t yet seen ‘Black Swan’, you should bookmark this page for later.

SPOILERS AHEAD

Summary of the Plot

The film begins with Nina’s dream. She dances as the White Swan in the ‘Swan Lake’ ballet, and the next day discovers that she has the chance to make it come true. Beth McIntyre, the lead ballerina of the company, is poised to retire, though not willingly, and a new face is needed to replace her. The new season is to start with ‘Swan Lake’ and Nina is selected for it due to her flawless presentation of the White Swan. However, the director, Thomas Leroy is skeptic of her ability to slip into the more challenging role of the Black Swan. While he tries to motivate her in every way possible, Nina is truly pushed after the arrival of Lily. The new dancer in the company proves to be a fierce competition, and thus begins Nina’s quest to attain perfection at the cost of her sanity.

Is Nina’s Mother Responsible for Her Downfall?

Before we discuss the extent of Nina’s mental ruin, we should think about the reasons that might have led to it. It doesn’t take much to figure out that she is an isolated person. The only consistent individual in her life is her mother, Erica. She, too, had been a ballerina, though not as successful, or as good, as her daughter. She says that she had to let go of her career because of her pregnancy. We might have believed her tale of “sacrifice” had her own daughter held her in high regard. Instead, we find Nina suffocated by her constant overbearing, yearning to break free.

Greatness requires dedication, and Erica didn’t have that. She had been mediocre, at best, and found an excuse to get out of an already dying career when she had Nina. She had been frustrated with herself, but rekindled that passion through Nina. Luckily, her daughter already had a knack for it and proved to be a much better ballerina than her. But she doesn’t allow Nina to believe that, she doesn’t let her think that she is perfect. She takes credit for things, saying at one point that Nina would have been lost without her in those initial ballet lessons. She creates a shell around her and never lets her grow out of it. She holds on to the one great thing in her life, so much so that she is ready to hold her back.

Nina is never allowed to be more than just her mommy’s sweet girl. She is an adult, but still lives with her mother and has a room full of stuffed toys. The aesthetic of her room gives off the impression of a teenage girl and even her voice has a childish texture to it (which, if you notice, changes in the final scene). Her mother’s smothering has emotionally stunted her. It seems very unlikely that she has had any relationship, even if fleeting, in the past. When Thomas asks her if she has a boyfriend and wonders if she is still a virgin, she says no. But the hesitation in her voice speaks otherwise.

Much like Nina, Erica, too, doesn’t have a relationship outside of this mother-daughter scenario. She might use her dedication to her daughter as an excuse for this, but it can also be attributed to her own character flaws. Perhaps, she can’t be with someone unless she has complete control over them, as she has with Nina. Her daughter is not a kid anymore but that doesn’t stop her from clipping her nails, undressing her and reprimanding her as you would a child. She keeps track of her movements, calling her when she is late from work, stopping her from having a social life; keeping in touch with Susie in the office as if her daughter is going to a school; basically, she treats Nina as a child.

This shows that Erica has never been able to work through her own inadequacies and finds comfort in the fact that Nina is good because of her. Her daughter is the materialisation of the perfection that Erica had hoped to be in her own career, which is why she doesn’t want anything to distract her from this vision. She doesn’t want Nina to go astray and keeps her on a tight leash. While this does work, to some extent, it also sows the seed of absolute perfection in Nina.

Living under her shadow for so long, Nina has grown up with constant surveillance and with no freedom, whatsoever. Even her bedroom doesn’t have a lock. She thinks that if only she could be successful enough to support herself completely, if only she could prove to her mother that she is good enough, perhaps her mother would relinquish this leash.

Perhaps then Nina could move out and live on her own terms. She does love her mother, but she also wants to leave her. Despite what Erica thinks, Nina knows that she never really was good enough to be something like a Swan Queen. She might have refrained from saying all these things before, the time when she was unsure of her own talent, but now that she has the dream part, now that she is finally breaking out of her mother’s hold, she doesn’t hesitate in voicing this opinion. And she gets this voice because of Thomas.

While Erica wants Nina to be her “sweet child” forever, Thomas wants her to grow up. He wants Nina to go out, have some fun, be freer and wilder, because only then can she understand and embrace the skin of the Black Swan. He constantly pushes her outward while her mother struggles to shove her inside. Over time, Nina begins to heed Thomas’s lessons more, and her mother does not like this. She can feel her slipping away, and at times, it feels like she is jealous of her relationship with Thomas.

Nina doesn’t work hard to please her mother anymore; she has to please him. He says, “Everything Beth does comes from a dark impulse, from within, which is what makes her so thrilling to watch.” So, she taps into her own dark impulse. He says, “The only person standing in your way is YOU. Let her go. Lose yourself.” So, in her final performance, she gives in to the Black Swan, completely losing herself in the process.

There is another thing that could be derived from Erica’s behaviour, and honestly, even I believe that it might be a bit far-fetched, but there are some actions, some lines that I just can’t let go of. Often, it is seen that a person suffering from mental illness has been through a trauma before- physical, emotional or sexual. We know that Erica has been suppressing Nina emotionally, but has she also been doing so sexually?

In one of the scenes, when Nina first tries to bar her door, Erica asks her “sweetie, are you ready for me?” Not to forget, the many portraits of her daughter, all with the dark obscurity that she doesn’t exhibit, not until the Black Swan comes along. Nina quickly jumps into bed and Erica opens the door, wearing a nightdress. Now, it could just be that Erica likes to tuck in her daughter to sleep, but is that it? Is she jealous of Thomas because she thinks that he is sleeping with Nina? Is that why she doesn’t allow her to go out with strangers? Is that why Nina becomes so discomforted when Thomas asks her about her sexual encounters? Is that what makes Nina stay confined in the image of the White Swan- “the virginal girl, pure and sweet”?

How Long Has Nina Been Mentally Ill?

As Nina begins her journey towards perfection, her mental state deteriorates significantly. With every fall, she descends further into madness, which brings her nearer to the thing that has eluded her for so long. She inches closer to perfection and surrenders all control of her reality. But, how much of control did she have to begin with?

Thomas says that even though she is precise in her actions, she is also very frigid. She has always tried to perfect every move but never allowed to let her body run wild. As discussed above, it is fair to say that this fretting and fussing is the result of her upbringing. Her mother comments on everything she has to do or say or even eat, and she has inherited this trait. Moreover, she has first-hand seen the career of a failed ballerina in her mother and doesn’t want to end up like her, which makes her work even harder. Safe to say, this obsession with perfection is nothing new for her.

We see the signs early on, even before she gets the part of the Swan Queen. While Nina is going through a mental struggle, it takes a physical form as the rash on her back. She has it before the search for a new Swan is declared, and it worsens after she gives in to her mania. And this isn’t the first time she has had it. When her mother sees it, she instantly cuts her nails and makes a big fuss. She says, “you have been scratching yourself again.”

At first, we rule out this behaviour as the compulsive nature of Erica to be in control of her daughter’s life and to treat her like a child. But moving forward, a context begins to appear. If this rash symbolises Nina’s diseased state of mind and if it has happened before, then it means that Erica is aware of Nina’s hallucinations. Her daughter’s drive for perfection has broken her before; never like this time, but there are wounds and dents on her psyche.

Every time the rash appears, Erica knows that Nina is on the brink of a breakdown and so, she tends to it. When the rash is gone, Nina is back. This time, however, Nina succeeds in keeping it a secret. She tells her mother that she is fine, but in truth, the unchecked wound festers. Perhaps this is what makes Erica be more controlling. She knows how important it is for her to be the Swan Queen, but she doesn’t want her to get it by losing her sanity. She is aware that Nina’s state will only get worse if she is allowed to run free with it. This is why she wants her to come back straight home after work, this is why she doesn’t let her go on night outs and get involved with strangers. As Nina reaches her breaking point, Erica tries to keep her at home on opening night even when this is what her daughter has worked so hard for.

Is Lily the Black Swan?

In the ending credits of the film, every actor is credited not just with their role in the film, but also their counterparts in Swan Lake itself. While Natalie Portman gets to be the Swan Queen, Mila Kunis is the one credited with the Black Swan. In accordance with the story of the ballet, it is the evil twin who takes everything away from Odette, but nothing of such sort happens with Nina. She does feel threatened by Lily, but the latter never really takes anything away from her. Nina thinks that she wants to steal her role, but then, as Thomas says, every other girl wants that. Lily doesn’t even try to sabotage anything, so what makes her the Black Swan? Is it justifiable to call her that?

The true Black Swan of this film is Nina’s mental illness. Be it schizophrenia, or multiple personality disorder, or whatever else you want to call it, this is the only problem in her life. This is the thing that takes away everything, even her own self. Nina had been suffering before she met Lily, but with her, she finds a face for her fears. In this respect, she is like her mother, finding someone else to blame for her own flaws.

But as her condition gets worse, the mask of Lily, too, begins to disappear. The faint resemblance that they had begins to take her own form, sharper and more defined with every hallucination. The part that she had suppressed for so long is let loose and in the end, she gives in to it. With the Black Swan manifesting itself on the stage physically, her emotional transformation is completed too.

The Ending: Did Nina Die?

A piece at a time, the psychological toll chips away Nina’s mental balance, and her cocooned form is finally morphed into the character she had been trying so hard to embody. At first, she had been afraid of this transformation. She had been concerned about the rash; she had been horrified when a feather comes out of it when her legs crack, and she watches herself literally turning into a swan. Even while performing on stage as the Swan Queen, she had not fully embraced it.

It was only after she stabs her doppelganger , whom she believes to be Lily, that she completes the transformation. This marks the point of no return for her when she can’t go back to being the White Swan again. Because she has killed her. The Black Swan has declared that it is her turn now. When she performs as Odile, she embraces the feathers growing on her body. In fact, she revels in it. She lets it take over her until they turn into full-fledged wings, and she receives thunderous applause from the audience.

She returns to her room and gets ready for the next act, but is taken aback when Lily shows up to congratulate her. This is when Nina realises that Lily had never been into her room, they never had the fight, she never stabbed her. In fact, it was herself that she had sabotaged. She destroyed herself. This realisation brings her back to reality and she, once again, inhabits the sorrow and vulnerability of the White Swan. As the Swan falls to her death, the hall is deafened by applause, and Thomas and the crew surround her to shower their congratulations, Lily notices the wound. Nina declares that she was perfect and the scene fades into the white light.

Does this mean that Nina is dead? We don’t actually see her die, she is just wounded, so we can’t be sure of it. Maybe the blurred lights mean that she fell unconscious, maybe she received timely help and was saved. Or maybe, she succumbed to her wounds and died. But her mental state does make us question the nature of the wound. Was it exaggerated? Was it even there? The fight she has with Lily is just a hallucination, and she later discovers that she had stabbed herself. But maybe, she never did stab herself. No one else enters in her room after the fight, so we don’t have a second perspective of the situation. No one sees the shattered glass, no one even sees the wound when she is on stage. Also, she hadn’t been dancing alone.

The dance moves involved her male companion to hold her and touch her on what should have been the wounded area. All this time, he doesn’t feel the glass shard in her belly? Also, if it had been a fatal injury, how could she dance with such ferocity on stage? Perhaps, she had imagined the stabbing part as well. This means that she is not hurt and will be fine, though she might need to get help for her hallucinations.

Even though this makes sense, there is the question of Lily and everyone else seeing the wound in the end. Was this a hallucination too? Thomas calls her “my little princess”, which she thinks a compliment of the highest order from him, considering he only called Beth with this title. Nina wanted to be perfect like Beth, she wanted what her predecessor had, from her role to her lipstick to her compliment. Maybe this wound was the figment of the “sacrifice” she needed to make to be perfect.

How she was able to dance without any reaction to the wound could be explained as the adrenaline, and the lack of pain could be due to the sheer ignorance of her injury. (Brain does work in mysterious ways!) The Black Swan wasn’t hurt, right? It was the White Swan she had stabbed, and it is only after she reverts to playing Odette that Nina realises what she has done to herself.

Read More: Upcoming Natalie Portman Movies

'Black Swan': A Largely Empty Sensation

David Edelstein

Natalie Portman stars as Nina, a New York ballerina seeking ultimate perfection under the direction of Thomas Leroy, played by Vincent Cassel. Niko Tavernise/Fox Searchlight hide caption

Director: Darren Aronofsky
Genre: Drama
Running Time: 108 minutes

Rated R for strong sexual content, disturbing violent images, language and some drug use.

With: Natalie Portman, Mila Kunis, Vincent Cassel, Barbara Hershey, Winona Ryder

In Black Swan , Natalie Portman 's young ballerina, Nina, is a candidate to dance the Swan Queen in Tchaikovsky's Swan Lake , but her company's artistic director, Thomas, played by Vincent Cassel , maintains she is only suited for half of the double role. She's the very embodiment, he says, of the innocent White Swan. But for the dark, demonic twin, she's too childlike, repressed. Like a Method acting guru, Thomas exhorts her to lose control, surrender to her sexuality -- preferably with him.

"In four years, every time you dance, I see you obsess, getting each and every move perfectly right, but I never see you lose yourself," Thomas says. "All the discipline, for what?"

"I just want to be perfect," Nina whispers back.

"Perfection is not just about control. It's also about letting go," he says. "Surprise yourself so you can surprise the audience. Transcendence -- and very few have it in them."

"I think I do," she says, as she leans in closer toward him and bites his lip.

You'd think that would put the kibosh on her chances of playing the Swan Queen. But no, Thomas likes this biting, blood-drawing Nina, and he casts her in the role. But his challenge lingers. Can this sexually immature young woman who lives with an infantilizing mother in a pink bedroom surrounded by stuffed animals become the Black Swan?

The writer and director Darren Aronofsky dramatizes -- vividly, feverishly, expressionistically -- Nina's transformation into a more sexualized creature, as well as the visions that accompany that transformation. The camera follows about a foot behind Nina's slender neck as the locations change and doppelgangers pop up left and right. Reflections of Nina in mirrors take on a life of their own. Icky, feathery things sprout from her flesh. There are bloody assaults that might or might not be real.

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Ballerina struggles to unleash 'black swan' within.

Black Swan is a virtuosic piece of filmmaking, a tour de force -- and also, I think, a camp classic, like Showgirls remade by Roman Polanski. You could have a great time laughing at it and its goofy Freudian cliches, if only it weren't so bludgeoning.

Aronofsky's aesthetic can be easily stated: He wants to give you a drug experience. In his terrific first feature, Pi , the protagonist became obsessed with a mathematical equation, and his mental convolutions were right there in the camerawork and cutting. In his Requiem for a Dream , pills and heroin dictated the fractured syntax. In The Wrestler , Aronofsky crafted an ode to male masochism, to the notion that a man is only truly, ecstatically alive on the brink of self-obliteration. Black Swan is The Wrestler 's female-masochistic counterpoint, and on its own terms the film is perfectly worked out. But like most drug experiences, it's largely empty sensation -- it leaves little behind but a hangover.

Mila Kunis plays Lily, Nina's alternate whose talent makes her a rival for the lead role in Swan Lake. Niko Tavernise/Fox Searchlight hide caption

Mila Kunis plays Lily, Nina's alternate whose talent makes her a rival for the lead role in Swan Lake.

Portman gives the kind of performance that wins awards, largely because you're so aware of her sacrifices to play the part. She lost a ton of weight, and for an actress she dances well -- although not brilliantly or distinctively enough to convince you that the company director would single her out. When she finally becomes the Black Swan, she does have a great, glittery-eyed demonic look, and Aronofsky brings her bony face with its black-rimmed eyes into the camera, like a close-up of a shrunken head. It is, as Count Floyd on SCTV used to say, "Ooooh, skerrrry, kids," and a lot of critics and festival audiences have been wowed, dazzled, freaked out. When the movie is over, it takes a long time to purge Tchaikovsky from your brain.

But if you're a dance lover, I don't think you'll love Black Swan . Although Nina tells Thomas that her goal is "perfection," she doesn't really mean artistic perfection. I've never seen a dance movie with so little appreciation for the art of dance. Early on, even before Nina loses it, the camera seems to be shuddering in horror with every spin, and the dancers are all scary-looking, angry, emaciated women with dark hair severely pulled back, twisting and cracking their limbs -- puppets of Thomas, that tyrannical male deity.

But I left thinking the tyrannical male deity was Aronofsky, and that his vision, in the end, is no more complex or enlivening than a cheap hack-'em-up director's, treating your head in the manner of another Tchaikovsky title character: the Nutcracker.

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Don't believe the hype! Black Swan is the best film of the year! I love " Black Swan !" OMG Black Swan is amazing! You are going to love it! That's what people have been telling me for months, ever since the film opened at the Venice Film Festival this fall to raves reviews. Maybe I saw a different movie but I really didn't like this film. I did really like Natalie Portman's performance and it is definitely worth all the accolades. She has always been an excellent actress and the fact that she had to learn ballet and does it as well as she does in the movie, is impressive. Her performance is believable and interesting as well. The problem with this film was not the acting, although I did think Barbara Hershey was terrible, but the trouble was the confusing script and abstract directing. I'm really surprised at how much I disliked this film, especially because I really loved "The Wrestler," Darren Aronofsky's last movie, but in the end I was just bored and completely turned off by the film's strange and ridiculous twists.

The film begins by introducing us to Nina (an excellent Natalie Portman), who is a professional ballerina in New York City. She lives with her overbearing mother (Hershey), who was once a ballerina as well. Nina desperately wants to break out of the ensemble and become the prima ballerina in their new show, "Swan Lake." Thomas (Vincent Cassel), the director of the ballet has decided to replace his lead ballerina (Winona Ryder), with a new star. He holds auditions and Tina is set on getting the part. The ballerina must play both the white and black swan in the show and she is perfect for the role of the white swan. Unfortunately she doesn't fit the role of the black swan as well as her rival, Lily (Mila Kunis). After pleading with Thomas for the parts, Nina wins the two roles and begins rehearsals. She strikes up a cautious friendship with Lily, which ends in unexpected ways. At the same time, something strange is physically happening to Nina, which she cannot understand. As opening night approaches and Nina prepares for her role, she pushes her body to the limit, as well as her relationship with her mother and eventually things start to fall apart. Now, Nina must pull herself together and figure out what is happening to her before Lilly is able to sabotage her and steal her roles.

The film has many twists and turns and I was careful to not give too many away but they all felt forced and out of left field at times. The movie seems to be an interesting look at the world of competitive ballet but then becomes a strange horror film by the end. While the movie doesn't answer many questions by the conclusion I was just left with, "Really? That's it? That's the explanation?" I wish the film had known what it wanted to be. The ballet stuff was interesting enough, especially thanks to Portman's performance, so I don't feel like I needed that psychological thriller that the movie became. I'm not really sure what Aronofsky was even trying to say with this movie. I guess he was trying to say something about dual personalities but I just felt it missed the mark. There are also some weird scenes that come out of nowhere too, like a masturbation sequence as well as a love scene between Portman and Kunis. They didn't seem to fit the story, although they did fit the offbeat tone of the film.

I guess what maybe confuses me the most is, what are people seeing in this? Am I missing something? I wanted to like this movie more, but I just didn't enjoy it. Again, Portman was fantastic and the dancing was beautiful. I wish there was more of it. Portman's Nina is very endearing and we do care for her by the film's end but her metamorphose seems like a cheap metaphor more than anything else. Kunis is good in her role as the bad girl and can certainly carry off the dancing too. While the final moments of the film shed some light on what has been happening throughout the movie, you almost don't care by that point. Getting there was so awkward, confusing and tedious that you kind of just say, "Okay, that's it?" The story is just bizarre and the mood of the film is odd. Maybe the director wanted it to be jarring in some way but I was just unimpressed by the pacing of the film.

There are definitely some interesting aspects to this movie but I just think it fell short. I know it is a front-runner for a best picture nomination at the Oscars this year and I don't really know why. I can easily think of ten better movies than this one that came out this year. Aronofsky will probably be nominated as well and I just think he's made a lot of better movies than this. Now, if the script gets a nomination ... that would be a tragedy. But Portman deserves all the praise she is receiving for this role, especially considering how good she is in such a strange and uneven film. She gives a fully rounded performance and he believability, as a ballerina, is just incredible. In the end, I think Aronofsky bite off more than he could chew. He was trying to make an abstract/artsy film with a twist and I don't think it worked. The genre aspect confuses the film and I think the metaphor then gets lost. What could have been a beautiful movie about the New York ballet and the challenges of trying to survive in that world is instead a weird, uneven film that will leave you confused and unsatisfied at the end.

Movie and TV Reviews
Black Swan (2010)

Natalie Portman, Mila Kunis, Barbara Hershey, Vincent Cassel, Winona Ryder

Darren Aronofsky

Andres Heinz (Story), John J. McLaughlin (Screenplay), Mark Heyman (Screenplay)

Rated R

108 Mins.

Fox Searchlight

Additional: Additional Footage Behind the Scenes Include Digital Copy Sensor Matic

thout recalling the similarly themed masterpiece from 1948. While doesn't quite soar to the heights of it is an astounding and mesmerizing film featuring a career-defining performance from Natalie Portman that will forever be mentioned as one of her truly great moments in what is destined to be a long career in Hollywood.

From his beginning with Aronofsky has proven himself to be a fearless director of trailblazing cinema. Even when he kinda sorta misses the mark, it is nearly impossible to not have the highest degree of respect for Aronofsky's boldness of vision and cinematic, well, balls. Aronofsky has proven able to take the simplest story and turn it into a sublime and revealing visual masterpiece, as he did with last year's and as he's done here once again with Nina (Portman) is a dancer in a company at New York's Lincoln Center, ruled with a sort of George Balanchine type tyranny that blends talent, knowledge, sexuality and grace. In this case, the Balanchine figure comes in the form of Thomas Leroy (Vincent Cassel), Thomas has cast aside the company's prima ballerina and his lover, Beth (Winona Ryder), and is preparing to cast for the lead in "Swan Lake." It is clear that Nina is the best dancer for the White Swan, yet Thomas doubts her ability to pull off the required opposite, Black Swan. Into the mix comes Lily (Mila Kunis), a dancer who has the free spirit and boldness, if not the technique, that Nina does not.

If you dismiss because you fear it will simply be a "chick flick" or a simple ballet flick, then you will undoubtedly miss one of the year's finest cinematic performances in Natalie Portman's portrayal of Nina, a young woman who is so single-mindedly obsessed with success as a dancer that she has, as near as anyone can possibly tell, failed in virtually every possible way to develop as a healthy, functional human being. Even Nina's failure to truly move beyond her technical perfection into a more passionate performance is symptomatic of her life that has been filled with denied thoughts, feelings, impulses and experiences. Her single-minded focus has been encouraged by her mother (Barbara Hershey), a woman who seemingly loves her daughter to a point of uncomfortable and intimidating intimacy.

It is difficult to describe without giving away far more than one should give away in reviewing the film or, for that matter, even discussing the film. The cinematic experience of and it is far more than simply watching a film, is akin to watching a psychological whirlwind of madness, mania, perfectionism, obsession and delusions. The film itself is excessively histrionic, a trait that will undoubtedly challenge some viewers yet a trait that remains faithful to the experience unfolding onscreen. Aronofsky, while clearly weaving the film's psychological tapestry, never seemingly takes sides with Nina, judging her to be possessing either madness or majesty. Instead, he simply allows her story to unfold and Portman surrenders herself completely to the experience in a performance that is simply mesmerizing to behold.

Cinematographer Matthew Libatique paints the film with broad visual imagery reminiscent of early Polanski or even Kubrick's imagery that fits both the beauty and grace of the unfolding ballet and the cracked world in which our scenario unfolds. While Portman may seem, at first thought, an odd choice for such a complex and intimately dark role, she is actually quite stunningly cast. Nina must, if she is to be convincing, be tremendously sympathetic, wondrous and vulnerable while still being able to project the sort of fragile brokenness that makes the audience accept her fragments without becoming repulsed by them and detaching from the cinematic experience. Nina's fractured soul is achingly beautiful and haunting and unforgettable.

Barbara Hershey turns in one of 2010's finest supporting performances as Nina's unrelentingly loving yet psychologically damaging mother, possessing an intimately brutal nature that is rivaled in the film only by Vincent Cassel's more outwardly exploitative Thomas Leroy, a man who seemingly believes that for a dancer to achieve greatness requires the willingness to dance inside the fiery pits of one's own inner dark demons. The weak link here is Mila Kunis, yet even Kunis gives a much better than expected performance. It's as if Kunis is pulled up to her highest potential by those around her and, in reality, her comic background works well for the increasing levels of absurdity that unfold here.

may very well be a difficult film for some to embrace, a film that seemingly celebrates the absurdity, obsessiveness and delusional nature of such an obsession with artistic perfection. Yet, if only for the mastery of the film's performance, is a film that practically demands to be seen and fully experienced.

As awards season nears, an Oscar nomination for Portman is assured and nominations for Hershey, Aronofsky and Libatique would not be unreasonable along with a Best Picture nomination for the film itself. Once again, Darren Aronofsky has created a film that is intellectually challenging, visually mesmerizing, emotionally shattering and, quite simply, unforgettable. is one of the best films of 2010.

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Natalie Portman as Dancer in 'Black Swan'
R. 1h 48m. By Manohla Dargis. Dec. 2, 2010. A witchy brew of madness and cunning, "Black Swan" tells the story of a ballerina who aches, with battered feet and an increasingly crowded head, to ...
'Black Swan' Deconstructed, Film's Many Faces
Yes, "Black Swan" is the latest example of what the film critic Jeanine Basinger has called the "My god, there's two of her!" device. Nina develops her own built-in anti-Nina. And it's ...
Aronofsky's 'Black Swan' Transforms Natalie Portman
Natalie Portman and Vincent Cassel film a scene of "Black Swan.". Ms. Portman said she immersed herself in ballet for a year to make the movie. Niko Tavernise/Fox Searchlight Pictures. As it ...
Black Swan movie review & film summary (2010)
Directed by. Darren Aronofsky's "Black Swan" is a full-bore melodrama, told with passionate intensity, gloriously and darkly absurd. It centers on a performance by Natalie Portman that is nothing short of heroic, and mirrors the conflict of good and evil in Tchaikovsky's ballet "Swan Lake.". It is one thing to lose yourself in your art.
Black Swan (2010)
85% Tomatometer 322 Reviews 84% Audience Score 100,000+ Ratings Nina (Natalie Portman) is a ballerina whose passion for the dance rules every facet of her life. When the company's artistic ...
Review: Black Swan
Review: Black Swan. Black Swan is Showgirls stripped bare of its camp affections, Suspiria with a pretense to realism, Repulsion for our J-horror-addled times. Darren Aronofsky's Black Swan begins in dreams, with the gorgeous ballerina ingénue Nina (Natalie Portman) starring in her own twisted version of Swan Lake and awakening a little ...
Black Swan [Reviews]
BLACK SWAN follows the story of Nina (Portman), a ballerina in a New York City ballet company whose life, like all those in her profession, is completely consumed with dance.
BLACK SWAN Movie Review
Like its protagonist, the film is technically magnificent yet knows when to unravel and embrace a glorious madness. It's an unforgettable thriller that demands repeat viewings as you want to fall ...
'Black Swan': Unlike any ballet movie you've ever seen
A review of Darren Aronofsky's dark "Black Swan," starring Natalie Portman, Mila Kunis and Barbara Hershey. ... MOVIE REVIEW . ... is a soloist in a New York ballet company who dreams of dancing ...
David Edelstein on 'Black Swan' and 'The Nutcracker in 3D' -- New York
In The Company, Robert Altman moved back and forth between physical (and emotional) punishment and sublime ballets, but Aronofsky isn't remotely interested in celebrating the Dance. Black Swan ...
Black Swan (film)
Black Swan is a 2010 American psychological horror film directed by Darren Aronofsky from a screenplay by Mark Heyman, John McLaughlin, and Andres Heinz, based on a story by Heinz.The film stars Natalie Portman in the lead role, with Vincent Cassel, Mila Kunis, Barbara Hershey, and Winona Ryder in supporting roles. The plot revolves around a production of Tchaikovsky's Swan Lake by the company ...
The film "Black Swan" has Harvard creators behind it
January-February 2011. In the new film Black Swan, Natalie Portman '03 plays Nina, a prima ballerina in New York who dances the Swan Queen in Tchaikovsky's Swan Lake as her first starring role. That means portraying both a White Swan who radiates innocence, sweetness, and light, and a darker Black Swan—seductive, dangerous, and evil.
The Portrayal of OCD in Darren Aronofsky's 'Black Swan ...
I revisited Black Swan a handful of months ago and had forgotten how dark, unnerving, and absolutely FANTASTIC the film is. Really recommend a re-watch for anyone who may be in the mood. Unfortunately it's not streaming anywhere which is weird, but it can be rented for a few bucks or found online with a little Google-fu ...
Black Swan
Black Swan - Metacritic. 2010. R. Fox Searchlight Pictures. 1 h 48 m. Summary Black Swan is a psychological thriller set in the world of New York City ballet. Featured dancer, Nina, finds herself locked in a web of competitive intrigue with a new rival at the company. (Fox Searchlight) Drama.
'Black Swan' Ending Explained: The Price of Perfection
Black Swan delves into the dark side of striving for perfection in the ballet world. The film portrays the intense mental health struggles faced by a ballerina chasing success. Nina's descent into ...
Movie Review: Black Swan a Gruesome, Masterful Horror Movie ...
Review in a Hurry: Challenged to tap into her dark side, a perfectionist ballerina (Natalie Portman) becomes increasingly lost in a waking nightmare of all her neuroses. Director Darren Aronofsky ...
Black Swan Movie Review
Black Swan Movie Review. A modern-day fairy tale that's freaky, sexy, and downright divine. Newsletter sign-up (Image credit: Fox Searchlight) By Caryn James. ... , New York, NY 10036. ...
Black Swan
Black Swan is full of scary-looking emaciated women, their dark hair severely pulled back, twisting and cracking their limbs and toes—puppets of a tyrannical male deity. Even before Nina begins ...
Black Swan Ending, Explained
Summary of the Plot. The film begins with Nina's dream. She dances as the White Swan in the 'Swan Lake' ballet, and the next day discovers that she has the chance to make it come true. Beth McIntyre, the lead ballerina of the company, is poised to retire, though not willingly, and a new face is needed to replace her.
Movie Review
Running Time: 108 minutes. Rated R for strong sexual content, disturbing violent images, language and some drug use. With: Natalie Portman, Mila Kunis, Vincent Cassel, Barbara Hershey, Winona ...
Black Swan Review
Natalie Portman's performance is Oscar worthy, but the rest of the film is confusing, polarizing, bizarre and ridiculous. It could have been a compelling expose about the world of competitive ...
"Black Swan" Review
"Black Swan" Review : It is impossible to watch Darren Aronofsky's near masterpiece Black Swan without recalling the similarly themed masterpiece The Red Shoes from 1948. ... Nina (Portman) is a dancer in a company at New York's Lincoln Center, ruled with a sort of George Balanchine type tyranny that blends talent, knowledge, sexuality and ...
Black Swan now available On Demand!
A psychological thriller set in a world of New York City ballet, Black Swan stars Natalie Portman as Nina, a featured dancer who finds herself locked in a web of competitive intrigue with a new rival at the company (Mila Kunis). A Fox Searchlight Pictures release by visionary director Darren Aronofsky (The Wrestler), Black Swan takes a thrilling and at times terrifying journey through the ...
Review: 'Orphan Black: Echoes' Revisits a Sci-Fi Favorite
The new sequel to "Orphan Black" raises interesting questions about the nature of memory but misses the charm of that show's star, Tatiana Maslany. Listen to this article · 4:27 min Learn more

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