@sumitsays: Black Swan. If ballet + body horror = inspired, I’m looking forward to flamenco + splatter

I’ve mostly seen Black Swan described as a psychological thriller – a term that I’ve always understood to mean that the protagonist has to use their ingenuity and wits, rather than physical strength, to escape a situation, the threat of violence being more present than violence itself. (Wait Until Dark would be my canonical example.) Black Swan, however, is about a young woman’s descent into dysmorphic insanity. Almost every scene in this film is disturbing in a visceral sense (including those that reveal the phenomenal physical stresses associated with ballet): bodies are flexed, broken, torn up, destroyed and finally reshaped into unsettling new forms. So I’d say it owes more to “body horror” than “psychological thriller”.

Pigeon-holing aside, is it any good? Well, I enjoyed it, though it did lay it on pretty thick. Films that give the audience very few clues about what to believe run the risk of losing their emotional investment, and it would seem that’s the case for some of Black Swan‘s viewers. I found it easy enough to pin myself to the fate of Natalie Portman’s tormented prima ballerina; whether what’s she’s experiencing is “real” or not in some objective sense didn’t matter much to me. I enjoyed the structure, too, with the character’s arc mirroring that of the ballet she’s performing in; Aronofsky mashes it up enough that the ending is satisfyingly resonant rather than hokily obvious. (A personal irritation: Black Swan bears some striking similarities with a novel I plotted but never got round to writing about five years ago. Oh well.)

Incidentally, I’m not kidding about the flamenco-splatter movie. Someone do it. All those scarlet frills…