Film Review: Black Swan

To aid our research, we thought that doing a film review would widen our knowledge and would encourage a deeper study of a psychological thriller:

Black Swan stars Natalie Portman as Nina, a delicate, overly mothered dancer with the New York City Ballet who goes into a state of mental breakdown when she lands the dual roles of the White and Black Swans, Odette and Odile, in a production of ‘Swan Lake’. Aronofsky has gone for a very unrealistic approach when representing the girls damaged mental state – and the ballet’s own story and themes – in everything from an invasive, swirling camera angles and shots, to the loud and creepy music used in most scenes and dark colours used to contrast the innocence of Natalie when she wears a white tutu.

It is not clear what’s real or not in Black Swan as there is no indication to what is mental thoughts and what is real life. Aronofsky’s approach to psychological drama makes other psychological thrillers that we have evaluated look very timid and unpowerful. He doesn’t go for a gradual reveal of insanity, instead, right from the start, we see Nina tearing off impossible amounts of skin from her fingers and hear awful cracks and snaps as she exercises her feet.

Throughout the film we see Nina's damaged psychological state becoming more and more obvious and aggressive. We see Nina’s legs bending and snapping, just as she hallucinates while looking at the walls of the flat she shares with her ultra-protective mother, played as a witch by Barbara Hershey. Her other nemeses are a newly retired dancer (Winona Ryder) and a pretty new colleague (Mila Kunis). Our view of both is entirely distorted by Nina’s breakdown as she struggles to play both swans and defy Thomas’s (her dance teachers) concerns that she’s too pure to play the more evil role.

The film’s endless pulp elements like the stabbing, drugs, blood and strangling are tempered by the innocence of the story’s context – the classical ballet music, dancing, costumes - and the films strong momentum. Aronofsky has taken a disturbed psychological state and displayed its effects and Nina's feelings visually. He’s more concerned with expressing Nina’s madness and reflecting it in the world about her than in making any sense of her character or the life of a dancer. It is overall a very powerful and disturbing film that displays all the common codes and conventions of a psychological thriller.



We also found this video which further outlines the film and encourages debate about the successes of the film and compares it to other films by the same director, Darren Aronofsky: