I suppose I am going to have to apologize in advance to a few friends for this one. I didn't get it. Or rather, I got it completely, but my cultural naiveté prevented me from appreciating it. The story follows a ballet company putting on Swan Lake. Natalie Portman gets the lead, and in this version, she will play both the white swan and the black swan, which requires her to dance two completely different personalities. The plot device is that her own personal life begins to mirror that of the ballet, often blurring the lines between reality and imagination. And even in my ignorance of dance, I could recognize what I guessed to be the Swan Lake soundtrack popping up in the real-life scenes to explicitly show the crossover. Part way through I began to think, this is Fight Club of the dance world (and the fact that I am thinking of Fight Club in the middle of a ballet gives a hint about my engagement).
What I suppose makes this a great film is how closely the displayed intensity and stress and competition of being a lead in a ballet matches that of reality. People who have some experience with the dance world, or probably with any instance of an emotionally intense investment in creating a role, have probably raved about this film (a la the Academy of Motion Pictures). So while I know of these experiences anecdotally, I haven't felt or experienced anything like them, meaning this film felt more like a bio-pic than a psychological thriller. Without the emotional connection, we are left with a rather predictable thriller.
2 stars (out of 5)
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