Directed by: Darren Aronofsky
Starring: Natalie Portman, Mila Kunis, Vincent Cassel
Rating: R

Natalie Portman stars in Black Swan. (Courtesy photo)

You know a movie is good when its word-of-mouth advertisement is stronger than its TV advertisement. You know a movie is special when its lead actress wins a Golden Globe for her performance. And a movie is really a keeper if its Saturday Night Live spoof features Jim Carrey prancing around in a black tutu with buffalo wings tattooed on his back. Black Swan has all three.

Darren Aronofsky, who last gave us The Wrestler, is back with another film centering on a person struggling between a destructive career and a destructive life. Natalie Portman (V for Vendetta) plays Nina Sayers, a professional ballerina who lives with her mother in New York. Nina is a quiet and sweet girl, so the choice to cast her as the White Swan in her company's upcoming production of Swan Lake is obvious. However, her director, Thomas Leroy (Vincent Cassel) wants her to play the Black Swan as well. Driven by the emergence of a rival in company newcomer Lily (Mila Kunis) and by her own obsessive need to satisfy Thomas, Nina steadily goes mad, suffering from a bizarre whirlwind of hallucinations and self-mutilations. As she descends into her personal hell, it becomes harder and harder for us to tell friends from enemies, and eventually reality from illusion.

While Black Swan is not a horror movie, it is intensely frightening. Andres Heinz and Mark Heyman's screenplay gets the ball rolling with its confusing (in a good way) mixture of characters and relationships and brutal it-was-all-just-a-dream sequences. Then Aronofsky steps in with an extensive and unrelenting use of mirrors that, in addition to creating the psychotic feel of the movie, allows for some nifty camerawork. And when the cameras aren't messing with us through mirrors, they're getting up close and personal with Nina so that we can see every single moment of her life unraveling. There's also a surprising amount of special effects to aid the film's sense of distortion.

Portman handles Nina's psychological weakness well—or, rather, she doesn't handle it well at all, which is perfect for the role. The opening scenes are almost as surprising as the final scenes, as the audience is taken aback by just how delicate Portman's Nina is. But it isn't long before her delicateness morphs into fragile mental disturbance. Mila Kunis (TV's That '70s Show), as Lily, is the personification of the Black Swan that Nina must become, somewhere between seductress and friend. Of course, it's anyone's guess as to which one is the real Lily and which one is an exaggerated side of Nina's psychosis, but for the record, Kunis is a pleasant surprise as both. Cassel (Ocean's Twelve) is satisfactory as the lusty art director, although he has an occasionally repetitive script to work with, so Thomas can come across as a tad one-sided.

Black Swan is sure to leave its audiences talking, and generally in a good way. The most common remark I've heard is something along the lines of "Black Swan blew my mind!" I would be hard-pressed to find someone able to watch Black Swan without feeling the same way, or at least to react with some form of disbelief. Aronofsky strikes gold again (and Portman's starting to look like a good bet for the Best Actress Oscar), although in a frenzied way; I would call his style "controlled chaos," but that makes it sound too precise. The only way I can think of to describe his latest venture is that it's just a beautiful movie about hideous things. It's unpredictable and disgusting, but we can't take our eyes off it. We don't want to see any more than we have to, but we don't want any less than what we're given.

Danny Eisenberg is a 2010 graduate of the Bromfield School and is currently a student at the University of Pennsylvania.