Whenever asked to define what the horror genre is to me, I always refer to the works of Edgar Allen Poe, particularly his story the Sphinx. This is a story about a man who is stressed as everyone around him is dying of cholera. He retreats to a country home. There, while sitting at a window, he sees a huge monster running towards his cabin. He is stressed out of his mind, convinced this is a sign of his own imminent death. In the end it was merely a spider that was dangling a couple of inches in front of his eyes. His stressed mind created the monster, feeding his feeling of loss of control over the situation around him.…

Ingeniously balancing beauty & horror from start to finish, Black Swan is a harrowing depiction of a passion turning into an obsession which ultimately sets in motion a chain of events that results in complete self-destruction. Apart from being one of the best offerings of its year, this psychosexual thriller is also Darren Aronofsky's finest work since his 2000 manic Requiem for a Dream.

The story concerns Nina Seyers; a highly skilled ballet dancer who is chosen as the ballerina for her ballet company's next play 'Swan Lake'. Perfect in the role of the delicate & innocent White Swan character, Nina fails to convincingly pull off the personality that is required for the sly & sensual Black Swan. And in her desperate attempt…

Nightmarish, harrowing, alluring, and simply magnificent; Black Swan is one of the three masterpieces created by one of the finest directors of our generation, Darren Aronofsky. Combined with a deserving performance by Natalie Portman, fantastical and fluid direction by Aronofsky, mind-melting and horrific imagery, and a general mood of disquiet and instability; the entire film culminates in a work that can only be described as perfect.

Melding both the sick perversity of early Cronenberg and the quiet elegance of Roman Polanski's chillers, Black Swan is a psychological thriller that feels richly unique even though its woven from familiar cloth. The story centers on Nina, a shy and childlike ballet dancer who is chosen to be the lead in the play,…

A Ballet Dancer emerges into the spotlight. She twirls on pointe, with a smile on her face, carefree. She gets worried as a dark figure approaches her, she tries to avoid it, but it follows her.

Nina wakes up dreaming about the Swan Lake as herself as the Swan Queen. She has been trying and working hard to get to that spotlight. Her mother is overprotective of her, like Nina is still in Primary School.

Nina thrives for perfection. her dance looks like it, but it is perfect for the White Swan as Thomas Leroy the director of Ballet tells her. For to be the Black Swan, Nina has to let go of her Perfection, become carefree, seduce the prince…

92/100

(Yeah, I am a hack, I am copying Silent Dawn's style, but honestly, when I was ten, I used the rate movies on a scale of 0 to 100. So lemme do mah thang)

Half-Baked Thoughts on Black Swan

Crazy. Insane. Other words. That’s basically this movie in a nutshell. Only, not just craziness for the sake of being different, but rather “insanity”, “craziness”, and “other words signifying crazy” to illustrate a frightening display of the pressure we put on ourselves. Examining what drives us to accomplish our tasks, when does passion turn into blatant competitiveness, and how we neglect ourselves to achieve. The set of events were played out so crazily and completely irrationally, that it left me…