Black Swan
Teetering on whether this is deserving of a 5/5. Absolutely incredible and riveting watch for basically the entire duration of its runtime. Natalie Portman may have actually evoked one of the most powerful roles I’ve ever seen in my life. I genuinely cannot think of a movie where the main character has to do more than she does in this movie, the wild emotional swings, getting groped a little bit there, and obviously the dancing. While she didn’t do all of it, she did a vast majority and that would make this one of the most physically demanding roles probably ever, and she dances brilliantly.
The psychotic loose grip she has on reality that continues to loosen over the course of the movie is one of the few examples in movies where someone experiencing delusions actually added to the viewing experience for me, I generally don’t like that tool bc it honestly just annoys me more times than not, but seeing her mental state being expressed through these projections she places on the other characters really elevated things for me.
This certainly is an Aronofsky film, as most of this movie made me uncomfortable to watch. A vast majority of the color palette is black and white, and the sparing colors are most often green, which used in the way he decided to just made me want to claw my skin off—I felt unclean. This man has a gift for body horror. It’s infrequent but visceral and excruciating. Very little CG would naturally be used in a movie like this, but the sparing VFX were executed exceedingly well. I will say this was a drastic step up in terms of watchability from Aronofsky’s first film I saw, Requiem for a Dream, which was such a horror fest I could hardly finish it.
When the Black Swan finally made her appearance I was enraptured. I simply couldn’t take my eyes off the screen for about the last 20 minutes. A masterful work of art from all involved.