Black Swan

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Year:	2010
Country of origin:	USA
Director:	Darren Aronofsky
Genre:	Psychological horror
Starring:	Natalie Portman, Mila Kunis, Vincent Cassel, Barbara Hershey, Winona Ryder
Rating:	5/5
IMDB link:	http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0947798/
Tagline:	No tagline
Favourite line:	"That was me seducing you. It needs to be the other way around."

Just back from seeing Darren Aronofsky's latest mental-fest, Black Swan, and I am truly numbed.
It's not often a film renders me exhausted by sensory overload, blunted as I am by years of watching the most excessive, mind-bendingly hideous and depraved movies I can find, but this was a truly draining experience.

The plot:
Natalie Portman plats Nina Sayers, a ballet dancer performing in a troupe at the rehearsal stage for an updating of the ever popular Swan Lake. She rehearses keenly, eager to land the role of the Swan Queen. but the director of the show Thomas Leroy (Vincent Cassel) believes that she is only capable of performing The White Swan; virginal, vulnerable and innocent and unable to plumb the psychological depths required to capture the mentality of The Black Swan.
Nina convinces him otherwise when he makes an inappropriate advance on her, biting him and, in so doing, unleashes a previously untapped aspect of her psyche.
As First Night looms, Nina descends into a miasma of horror and fantasy as the blackened spirit now pulsing through her begins to take hold.

Beautifully shot, with a stunning central performance from Portman, this is visceral and primal, posing a simple question to the audience:
Where is the line between obsession and madness?
I am desperately trying to get through this write-up without invoking the name of Dario Argento as it seems too obvious a reference, but it is hard to deny, Aranofsky's cine-literate style clearly harking back to the Giallo-Meister's finer days, but there is more to this than mere homage as the director throws in shades of Cronenberg's body-horror, dashes of Adrian Lyne's Jacob's Ladder, and even the passing thought of Fight Club on occasion.
Whilst 'Oscar nominees' normally have me fleeing the theatre with relief once the credits roll, just glad to be out of there to get away from the reeking pretension, the effect here was a mirror image, the movie glueing me to the seat throughout.
Simply magnificent.