d. Darren Aronofsky; w. Mark Heyman, Andres Heinz, John McLaughlin (story Heinz)
Natalie Portman, Natalie Portman, Vincent Cassel, Mila Kunis

NB: This review contains spoilers. If you don’t want to know, don’t read.

This is the first Darren Aronofsky film I’ve seen, but I’m aware of his reputation as an uncompromising director of sometimes-baffling dramas and this movie, very well received by British and American critics, certainly lives up to that reputation. Natalie Portman stars – by which I mean that she’s hardly ever off the screen – as Nina, a dedicated ballerina given the chance to dance the lead in Swan Lake. She has the technique and the grace to play the vulnerable white swan, but her director (Vincent Cassel) doubts that she has the dark power required for the duel-role of the black swan.

Both in casting and on the page, it’s Vincent Cassel’s Thomas Leroy who is the weak link here. His part of the story is overfamiliar – the prickish cocksman of a director who dominates a vulnerable young would-be star, alternately encouraging her and confounding her until she either cracks or delivers the performance of a lifetime. Cassell makes little headway with this limited part, which also requires him to dole out thudding exposition, but just when one might expect his villainy to ramp up, he withdraws and other candidates come to the fore as potential antagonists.

One is Mila Kunis, in a lively turn as a looser, less dedicated but funkier rival who ends up being cast as Portman’s understudy. The other is a Barbara Hershey, channelling Bette Davis as Portman’s mother, whose own ballet career failed to live up to expectations and who alternates pride, concern and envy in a very well-observed fashion. And let’s also raise a glass to Winona Ryder as the retiring ballet star, pleasingly bitter and lush in what is essentially a cameo role.

However, the real antagonist here is none of the above. Instead the role is fulfilled by Portman’s own fragile psyche, brought vividly to life by a hugely energised combination of jump-cutting, fractured soundscape and brilliantly-realised CGI. It’s this playing with reality which elevates the movie above its over-familiar backstage status-battle storyline. Although there are some quirky hints early on, from the middle of the movie, neither the viewer nor the protagonist can trust the reality of anything they see, and Aronofsky expertly builds the tension and confusion, almost to the end. From an objective standpoint, the stakes here are relatively low (will some girl dance quite well or very well?), but the entire film is designed so that we only never get that objectivity and see the world from Portman’s own increasingly-unreliable point-of-view.

At the centre of this increasingly demented maelstrom, then, is Portman herself. Aronofsky’s camera rarely leaves her – when it isn’t fetishizing her feet and her shoe-preparation routine, it’s crawling over her skin as she wounds herself, or as feathers apparently sprout from her flesh. When it isn’t hovering in front of her, it’s creeping behind her, or watching her reflection in one of the countless mirrors or other reflective surfaces which litter the film, and which make for some of its creepiest effects sequences. On the rare occasions when she isn’t filling the frame, we are generally looking out through her eyes – and sometimes both at the same time. Portman’s gaunt yet luminous beauty shines through the grainy photography, and her slightly Spock-like eyebrows mean she can transform effortlessly into Satanic counterpart without the viewer being entirely aware of what has changed.

In its bravura penultimate sequence, reminiscent of Terry Gilliam’s Brazil, the constant rug-pulling and demented energy becomes a little offputting and the whole thing threatens to tip into absurdity. And the final supposed revelation that to give such a “perfect” performance, Portman’s character has had to re-enact the plot of Swan Lake, right down to that self-destructive ending, is a little too pat, for what is otherwise such a breezily off-kilter fillm. But almost all of what goes before is fresh, disturbing, engaging and surprising.

Far too offputting for the Academy to do much more than nominate it, Aronofsky’s film is a complex mix of pulp melodrama, high art and character study. If you’ve been waiting all year for a nightmare psycho-horror fantasy film en pointe, then your wait is over, but this effort is very good rather than perfection.