[Film Review] Black Swan (2010)

Rivalries among female performers have always been a fruitful source of inspiration for filmmakers, from the scheming ingénue of All About Eve (1950) to the bitter child star of What Ever Happened to Baby Jane? (1962). Darren Aronofsky’s psychological horror film Black Swan (2010) deals with the familiar trope of the devious understudy but brings into focus the pressures faced by women in the ballet world, with the horror of institutional abuse emerging as the real threat to a dancer’s career.

Nina Sayers (Natalie Portman) is a rising star in the New York City Ballet Company. She is cast in the career-defining lead role of Tchaikovsky's Swan Lake, but the role requires her to play both the innocent White Swan and the seductive Black Swan. For the White Swan, Nina is the perfect choice. Timid and childlike, she lives a sheltered life in a small apartment with her mother – a resentful and controlling former dancer who gave up her career when she fell pregnant. Nina is her mother’s ‘sweet girl’, and her bedroom is an infantilised explosion of baby pink, cuddly toys and ballerina music boxes. 

For the Black Swan, her understudy Lily (Mila Kunis) is a more suitable choice. A spontaneous party girl with a carefree attitude, Lily indulges in junk food, takes recreational drugs, flirts with guys and lives dangerously. The immense pressure of the role sends Nina into a tailspin of extreme paranoia and terrifying visions as she becomes convinced that Lily is plotting to steal the spotlight. 

In recent years, discussions around the treatment of women in performance industries have been more open than ever before, from the #MeToo movement to Samantha Stark’s documentary Framing Britney Spears (2021). Whether you are watching Black Swan for the first time or revisiting it after its initial release in 2010, the film really brings to light this insidious abuse of power. 

The director of Swan Lake, Thomas Leroy (Vincent Cassel), embodies the toxic boy’s club attitude at the heart of the New York ballet scene. Cassel expertly brings an element of Hitchcockian sadism to the character, who torments his leading ladies with gruelling repeated performances. When he’s not bullying, shaming or objectifying Nina during rehearsals, he’s forcing himself on her behind a locked office door. In a particularly uncomfortable scene that conveys the strained politeness and escalating fear that is so familiar to women in these situations, Thomas invites Nina to his apartment for drinks and asks a series of impertinent questions: if she has a boyfriend, if she’s a virgin. He even tells her to masturbate as ‘homework’. Thomas is not just a nightmare boss, he’s an abuser and his behaviour is an open secret in the ballet company – an all too frequent occurrence that rings true for so many performance industries, from Hollywood film to pop music. 

Thomas controls women’s careers by exploiting their fears of being replaced, which Winona Ryder brilliantly articulates in her underrated performance as the retired prima ballerina Beth MacIntyre. Excessive competition is so ingrained in the dancers that any sense of sisterhood has been eroded by an overwhelming suspicion of scheming rivals. Through Beth’s mental deterioration, we see the extent of Thomas’ abuse of power from the beginning to the end of a dancer’s career, foreshadowing Nina’s inevitable downfall. At the beginning of the film, the ripple effect of institutional ageism and misogyny is clear when Beth is referred to as ‘approaching menopause’ and compared to a ‘grandmother’ by younger dancers. From Nina’s perspective, Beth is a troubled star on a self-destructive downward spiral. We see glimpses of her stumbling around drunk at a party or trashing her dressing room, but we never hear her side of the story. In many ways, Beth is silenced. This narrative framing reflects her position as an invisible ageing woman who is discarded because she is no longer considered desirable enough to play the Black Swan. The cycle of fear and replacement that plays out between Beth, Nina and Lily reveals much about the dynamics of performance industries, with male authority figures pulling the strings and women merely responding.

Black Swan’s psychological horror is so effective because it toys with universal fears that are ingrained in the human psyche, from uncanny visions of doppelgängers to mirror images coming alive and moving independently. Despite this, the film’s subtle moments of body horror have the most lasting impact. Whether real or imagined, the close-up shots of Nina’s broken nails and bleeding skin are excruciating. These shots by no means match the extremity of chainsaws ripping through limbs, but they certainly make you want to look away. The ordinariness of trimming a fingernail becomes so anxiety-inducing to watch because we anticipate something going wrong. In these scenes, Aronofsky captures the power of pain on a small scale, like a papercut between your fingers. The horror of these imperfections especially resonates with a ballet industry that obsesses over women’s bodies and pushes them beyond their limits, where beauty and perfection cannot be achieved without some degree of mental and physical suffering. 

When Nina dances the Black Swan routine in the film’s final act, Portman’s performance is at its most breath-taking. A tracking shot follows her as she owns the stage. As if possessed by the Black Swan, she stares back at the camera with demonic red eyes. This scene is so complex and emotionally charged. You find yourself rooting for Nina because she has endured so much torment and deserves her moment in the spotlight. At the same time, it is tinged with sadness because the role has completely consumed her. In this short but captivating scene, time stands still, nothing else matters. The old Nina is gone, but the audience is totally seduced.

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