By Robin Giles ’12, Staff Writer

In many ways, Darren Aronofsky’s psychological horror Black Swan is as compelling as it is disturbing.  Chronicling the mental collapse of ballet dancer Nina Sayers (Natalie Portman) as she prepares for the lead role in Swan Lake, the film is a dark exploration of a realm where beauty and pain, perfection and emotion intersect.

Somehow, Aronofsky manages to distort and disturb even before Nina begins her psychological breakdown.  From the onset of the film, the viewer is thrust into the impossibly pressurized atmosphere of Nina’s dance company, in which the physical stress and competing desires of the dancers is palpable.  Nina herself is the tensest of all, and Portman’s excellent performance reveals Nina’s emotional instability as she competes with her perceived rival, Lily (Mila Kunis).  Nina’s ballet director, played by Vincent Cassel, is controlling and aggressive; his physical manipulation of Nina’s body is perhaps the root of the film’s twisted exploration of sexuality.  At home, Nina’s relationship with her mother is bizarre, rife with suppressed anxieties and Freudian undertones.

As all of these tensions develop, Nina’s mental state swiftly deteriorates.  The cinematography perfectly captures her frantic and nauseating hallucinations, using a motif of mirrors and double-images to reveal Nina’s terminal insecurity and fear of replacement.   Intense scenes chronicle her perfectionism, with shots of her obsessive ballet practice routines focusing on her stressed and twisted musculature.  These shots are then expertly interspersed with sterile shots of cosmetic supplies laid out like instruments of torture.  Nina’s self-destructive perfection gives way to a dangerous and dark courtship between her and her rival, Lily.  One particularly innovative scene occurs in a club, in which the flashing lights and pounding music give way to about thirty seconds of complete obscurity, followed by a graphic and physically distorted sexual hallucination between Nina and her rival dancer.  The images are shocking, yet effective: by incorporating such disturbing content, Aronofsky reveals the true extent of Nina’s obsession, which moves beyond an internal struggle by transposing itself onto Nina’s perception of exterior events and persons.

While the film may be truly nauseating at times, both physically and emotionally, Aronofsky has crafted a compelling exploration of the pressures that seem to control our perception.  The hallucinations are perfectly executed and subtly graceful, and, despite the horror, the film truly animates the conflict between artistic beauty and emotional isolation.