This will be the first and last time I’ll ever watch this movie. I usually don’t say that because I like to give movies a second chance, but this is a special case. It’s not that the movie was bad, it was actually very well done, but I wasn’t prepared for how disturbing it would be. It’s been a couple days since I watched it and I’m still kind of in a state of shock. I went in expecting an artsy, dramatic film about a troubled ballerina. What it actually turned out to be was a creepy thriller about a severely mentally ill ballerina. I’ve seen a lot, and I mean a lot, of creepy, weird things in all the films I’ve watched but this one takes the cake. It’s wasn’t gory and there wasn’t jump scares, but the imagery was just so, so, so weird and unnatural. Horror films don’t really freak me out, I actually find them kind of boring. It’s the psychological thrillers that can sometimes get to me. For instance, The Game is a psychological thriller that I really like and didn’t find it scary or disturbing at all, but Seven is a psychological thriller that I really didn’t like and I thought I would never see something more disgusting/creepy until I saw Black Swan. Maybe it’s actually not that bad, but the fact that I wasn’t expecting it at all made it seem way worse. A big problem I had with this movie is that the main character is schizophrenic and we’re seeing the movie through her eyes, but it gets to the point where you have no idea if somethings real or not to the point that it really messes with the story. Joker did something similar but isolated the hallucinations to one supporting character which made it pretty easy to keep the story straight even through the eyes of an unreliable narrator. By the third act of Black Swan, it seems as though nearly everything the narrator is expierencing isn’t actually happening to the point where it gets a little redundant and annoying. Though this film was unnecessarily creepy and hard to follow in my own opinion, it did do a lot of things right. First and foremost, and what kept me watching, was how beautiful it was. Every scene had a specific color scheme and was just so meticulously planned and choreographed that it seemed as though you were actually watching a ballet. Natalie Portman was unbelievable, considering the physical and dramatic feats that were required of her in this film.
I’m an avid re-watcher, but this is one of the few films I’ve seen that I’ve enjoyed and appreciated, but said ‘never again.’ It will have you looking over your shoulder and possibly questioning your own sanity for a little while after viewing.
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May Featured Movie QuoteBarry B. Benson: Yellow-black, yellow-black, yellow-black, yellow-black... Oh, black and yellow. Yeah, let's shake it up a little.
Yeah, I have letterboxd now
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