Portman plays Nina Sayers, a timid, sad-sack company ballerina who longs to be cast in a featured role by her company's director Thomas Leroy (Vincent Cassel), even if it's just to get approval from her controlling, ex-ballerina mother (Barbara Hershey), whom she still lives with. While her technical skill is impeccable, Thomas doesn't think she has enough passion to play the dual role of the White Swan and the Black Swan in Swan Lake, a point he repeatedly makes throughout the first half of the film, and I mean a lot. I've never wanted to punch a Vincent Cassel character to get him to stop talking more in my life, and that's saying something. But, after an awkward attempt at seducing Thomas goes awkwardly awry, Nina is awarded the coveted lead role, although Thomas is not shy about using his hands generously to show her how to bring out the Black Swan, by which he means an orgasm (apparently).

The new girl in the company, Lily (Mila Kunis) is alternately happy for her and hot on her heels for the role, but she also sports massive tattoos of black wings on her back, which seems like a huge problem for a ballerina, although the version of Swan Thomas is mounting is apparently meant to be "edgy." Besides, it's hard to tell how much of Lily is real, tattoos included. See, Nina was already seeing girls who looked like herself around the city, and now she seems to be imagining some other stuff, as well. Between getting passive-aggressived to death by her psychotic stage mom and regularly molested by her boss and even threatened, kinda, by the company's forced-out prima ballerina (Winona Ryder), her hallucinations are getting worse and worse, and it all builds to a crazy night of excess with Lily and an even crazier opening night.

Portman really knocks it out of the park as the fragile Nina, who always seems on the verge of tears -- and with good reason. Being a ballerina sucks. Portman's physical transformation for the role into a walking skeleton would be disturbing enough, without Nina's ongoing on-screen transformation into some sort of evil Chicken Lady, not to mention her constant need to placate all of the lunatics who control her life. Vincent Cassell gives great A-hole as always, and Mila Kunis basically plays the same fun-loving character she always plays, but Barbara Hershey is beyond evil as the manipulative mother who treats Nina like a show pony who she probably should have put out of her misery years ago. She's like a slightly less cartoonish version of Mother Gothel in Tangled, but with more time spent grooming the living conduit to her youth she shares her tiny Manhattan treehouse with.

The movie has so many reflective surfaces it could easily have been a high-end installment in the Mirrors horror franchise, except it doesn't have half the necessary number of cheap scares. It does have a constant feeling of dread, though, and the special effects in the second half are pretty creepy and breathtaking, even if they're totally unnecessary. Red-eyed, serenely focused Nina in her Black Swan makeup is menacing enough, and she looks like she could be a henchman for one of the more theatrical comic-book villains, or even be one herself. Given how much the themes of popular genre movies tend to pop up in comic books in the six months to a year following their release, I wouldn't be surprised to see a ballet-themed villain appear in the pages of Batman, or Daredevil, or another acrobatics-heavy book in the near future. Way to class up the genre, Aronofsky -- now bring on The Wolverine.

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