Black Swan (Ed's review)

Black Swan is the best film that's been released in years. It is original, just when I thought that every story line has already been done and we can only tweak them now. The story revolves around Nina, a committed ballerina who wants to land the lead role in the musical Black Swan. She doesn't seem to have any friends, but is the victim of an overbearing mother and bitchy colleagues in ballet.

The story within the story is that a woman is trapped inside a white swan and can only be released if a human man falls in love with her. This is about to happen when the evil black swan comes to seduce the man and steal him from the white swan. Torn apart by grief, the white swan commits suicide. In the production, the same ballerina has to play both the white and black swans - two contrasting roles. Nina is deeply hurt when the sleazy director Leroy says that she is too frigid to play the black swan, which has a different dancing style to match the seductive nature of the black swan. Nina resolves to win the role for herself and to give a perfect performance.

Other prominent characters include Lily - a frenemy who is competing with Nina for the role - and Beth - who was once the star performer but has passed her peak and lost her self-control. The mother treats her as if she is still a child, taking offence if she doesn't like her cake, telling her when to go to bed, dismissing a visitor for her at the door and constantly ringing her on her mobile when she's out of the house. I think that we all know at least one parent who tries to live their life through their children's successes. I found the mother-daughter relationship somewhat reminiscent of the film Carrie, which also features an overbearing mother who denies any independence to her child and a subsequent rebellion.

What makes the film so intense is how most of it is shown from the perspective of the paranoid Nina, who imagines people to be there when they are not and scratches herself so badly that it draws blood. Some of the scenes that focus on her paranoia are as scarey as anything in horror, which was not what I was expecting from the film (nice surprise). Leroy tells Nina to touch herself to loosen herself up for the role and some scenes dwell on her doing just that, in one case with an elaborate fantasy. In many horror films, you get some sign before a gruesome scene. Black Swan is so fast-moving that you're suddenly faced with gore and/or sex having been watching ballet only a few seconds earlier. To be clear, only a minority of the film is gore but it comes at you so quickly that it's what has the biggest impact on you.

The constant switching between reality and imagination meant that there were one or two scenes in which it's not clear whether it's real. I expect that this was intended to give an air of mystery. One such scene that I discussed with Andy comes towards the end when Nina catches some back-stage sex after the lights have all gone out in the practice room.

I have only one criticism of the film: the shots rarely last more than a few seconds, and this becomes annoying in cases where there's a conversation going on and it switches between the two speakers every few seconds. This hyperactive cinematography caused me to miss one or two things: for example, I grasped that Nina had hurt her mother somehow in the scene when she escapes from confinement in her room, but it cut away so quickly that I didn't catch how she'd hurt her mum.

I was spellbound throughout the entire performance and felt that I'd got full value for money, even if some audience members were quite annoying. This gets 5 stars from me.