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BLACK SWAN

Compelling thriller explores ballet’s dark side...

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Directed by Darren Aronofsky

Starring Natalie Portman, Mila Kunis

Darren Aronofsky’s previous film, The Wrestler, explored the lengths a person will push themselves to for their art.

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It’s a theme he revisits here, exchanging the pro-wrestling for the more rarefied, though no less punishing, milieu of ballet dancing.

Nina (Natalie Portman) is the new prima ballerina at a New York company, promoted to dance both the Black and White Swan roles in Swan Lake.

The dainty Nina – who lives at home with her domineering mother (Barbara Hershey) – is perfect for the virginal White Swan, but less equipped to play the seductive Black Swan.

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Goaded by Vincent Cassell’s sleazy artistic director to seek out her darker impulses, Nina begins to unravel, pushing the film towards a melodramatic but compelling mix of Repulsion-era Polanski and Cronenberg-style body horror. It’s fairly bonkers stuff, but props to Portman, who’s in every scene – and Winona Ryder, brilliant as the neurotic, toxic former prima ballerina.

Michael Bonner

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