Originally published on metropolis.co.jp on May 2011

©2010 Twentieth Century Fox

It’s a rare film that can mesmerize you with beauty while it fills you with dread. Darren Aronofsky’s intellectually intriguing, superbly twisted, high-art companion piece to his low-art The Wrestler shows that while the hermetic world of ballet may be a lot prettier than pro wrestling, it’s not a bit less brutal. This psycho-horror-drama is told from the viewpoint of an aspiring ballerina (an Oscar-winning Natalie Portman) who is gradually losing her mind due to her own, all-exclusive perfectionism, the selfish machinations of her domineering mother (a truly scary Barbara Hershey) and the manipulations of the company’s arrogant impresario (an excellent Vincent Cassel). These pressures intensify when the latter selects her to play the lead in Tchaikovsky’s Swan Lake, which requires the dancer to convincingly portray two opposing characters. But he criticizes that while she is technically perfect for the pure White Swan, she lacks the emotion, the worldly seductiveness necessary for the Black Swan, and her attempts to fix this push her already unstable psyche closer to the edge. For better or worse, she reaches her targeted level of schizophrenia in a riveting, intoxicating third act that still haunts my retinas. Outstanding.