Black Swan Review

Aronofsky shoots a ballet company like body horror and never blinks, which is why the picture works on both registers at once. Matthew Libatique's handheld camera rides Nina's shoulder blades through corridors and mirrors until the frame itself turns claustrophobic, and Clint Mansell's warped Tchaikovsky makes a familiar score sound predatory.

Natalie Portman builds the performance on withheld appetite: everything is clenched, from the shoulders to the vowels, so the moment the black feathers break the skin the release is genuinely frightening rather than merely gory. Vincent Cassel calibrates Leroy exactly to the tolerance for menace this world has already established, and Barbara Hershey makes the apartment scenes as tight as the studio ones.

Mila Kunis provides the necessary looseness, a rival who may only be a projection. The film is not subtle about its doubling, the mirrors and scratched skin and the swan white against black, and the dialogue is functional at best. But the commitment to Nina's point of view is absolute, so the unreliability never plays as a cheat. It is a horror movie about perfectionism made by a perfectionist, and it earns its final line.