Natalie Portman and Mila Kunis in their prime, partying in New York City and breaking their toes dancing ballet.  What’s not to love about Darren Aronofsky’s 2010 masterpiece Black Swan?

Well, there’s probably something wrong with it, but I enjoyed this film immensely.  I remember when Black Swan was in the theaters.  The nation was still in the depths of the Great Recession.  The T.E.A. Party was a valid political movement, and hadn’t yet been co-opted by charlatans.  I weighed 290 pounds and worked a job I hated.

Yet I somehow missed it at the time, although it looked like a flick I wanted to see.  I’m not big on ballet, but who wouldn’t want to gawk at Natalie Portman?  There are many arguments against anti-Semitism, but simply saying, “look at Natalie Portman” is probably the strongest expression of pro-Semitic sentiment.

Lustful digressions aside, my girlfriend and I watched Black Swan on our mountain excursion, and it stuck with me for days.  In quiet moments as we hiked or drove throughout the Appalachian Mountains of North Carolina, I’d think about scenes and ideas from the film, and we’d inevitably discuss them.

Nina Sayers (Portman), a young and dedicated ballerina, dreams of landing a leading role in a major production.  While she is technically proficient and strives for perfection, she lacks the “it” factor—an inner passion that manifests itself in performance.  Things change when the ballet company’s director announces he is casting a single dancer for the role of both the White Swan and Black Swan in a production of Swan Lake.

Nina perfectly executes the part of the innocent and pure White Swan, but struggles to portray the seductive wickedness of the Black Swan.  She seemingly loses out on the roles, but when she confronts the company director and he kisses her, she bites his lip.  Impressed with her pique, the director casts her in the roles.

Weeks of intense training follow, with Nina struggling to inhabit the sexual ferocity of the Black Swan.  The ballet director seems to toy with her in extremely inappropriate ways—including fondling her to the point of arousal—in an attempt to unlock Nina’s darker side (after the fondling, he says, “I just seduced you, but you should be seducing me,” referring to the character of the Black Swan).

The pressure starts to mount and Nina struggles to cope with it, enduring what may be disassociative states in her personal and professional lives.  She suffers from a strange rash, which may or may not be due to compulsive scratching.  Her overbearing stage mother lives vicariously through her daughter, at times encouraging her, but frequently seeking to control Nina through manipulation and cutting comments.

Into the mix appears Lily (Kunis), a dusky, sensual dancer from San Francisco.  She is everything Nina is not:  relaxed, independent, and sexy.  She exudes a free-spirited lust for life—and, perhaps, for Nina (and certainly randos in New York’s many bars and nightclubs).  Nina both wants to be Lily and despises her, fearing that the company director will give her parts to the feisty newcomer.

As the film progresses, Nina finds her dark side, indulging in partying and aggressive acts of defiance against her mother (who, honestly, deserves the blowback—she sleeps in a chair in Nina’s room to watch her at night).  All the while she pushes herself to the edge of her fragile psyche and her physical limitations, striving towards a (possibly) lethal perfection.

The story is told largely from Nina’s perspective, so we watch the film with an extremely unreliable narrator.  Nina sees Lily morph into Nina on a number of occasions, and it’s unclear what is happening and not happening.  For example, late in the film Nina witnesses Lily engaging in raucous sex with the company director, only to see herself engaged in the lascivious act.

The company director is an intriguing character.  Throughout the film, I found myself asking if he was genuinely engaged in some kind of exploitive romance with Nina (which is heavily implied by a number of the characters, several of whom ask Nina what it’s like being with the director, to which Nina always responds with confusion), or if he was engaging in inappropriate seduction as a way to “train” Nina to let go.  It’s unclear how sexual their relationship is—one character says that the director thinks Nina is a “frigid little girl”—and there’s an insinuation that the director is using very unorthodox means to try to get Nina to awaken to her darker side—the Black Swan.

The ending of the film—which, naturally, features the debut performance of Swan Lake—is wild.  I don’t want to spoil it, but it’s the most taut depiction of the behind-the-scenes of a major ballet performance I’ve ever seen.

The film also depicts the massive physical and psychological toll ballet takes on its practitioners.  Women age out of it very young, and it is a brutal art form.  Reportedly, both Portman and Kunis undertook months of rigorous training to prepare for their roles, both losing weight that, let’s be honest, neither of them could probably afford to lose.  Nina’s breakfasts in the film consist of a single egg and half a grapefruit.  Her toes are constantly on the verge of breaking, and are almost always bleeding.  A dancer drops her painfully onto her knees at one point.  The film constantly highlights the extremes of physicality that must be taken to deliver a beautiful, graceful performance.  Talk about suffering for one’s art!

There’s so much to unpack in this film—too much for me to dive into here.  I can only recommend that you watch it yourself before it leaves Netflix at the end of this month.