Steps to destruction

I have always suspected that, if you look for the black swan within yourself, it will end in tears, and now Darren Aronofsky has proved me right. It will end in tears, as well as bloody gashes, horrors glimpsed in mirrors, warped hallucinations of a sexual nature and breaking your mother’s hand in a door jamb. If you think you may have the black swan within you, just leave well alone. Go shopping. Play Scrabble. Clear out the hall cupboard, as you have been meaning to do for ages (I don’t think you can squeeze another thing in there, although, God bless you, you will keep trying). And if you don’t want to listen to me, then at least take this film as a warning. This is an intensely compelling film which you might well want to see, but you would not want to live it. It is horribly dark.

Black Swan is set in the world of ballet, which I always suspected wasn’t all pretty tutus and chignons, and now Aronofsky has proved me right on this, too. (What is it like always being right? Most gratifying.) Ballet is hard; physically hard. Ballet is bleeding toes and whimpering muscles and bones that go snap, crackle and pop. The film does not spare us any of this, just as it does not spare us the mental cost and, in particular, the mental cost to one ballerina, Nina.

Nina is played by Natalie Portman, who has already won a Golden Globe for her performance, and whose immersion in the role is so complete that even her neck veins act, throbbing and pulsing and straining when the rest of her is still. Nina is a young woman, but appears infantilised.