The Skin I Live In (Spain, 2011)
Directed by Pedro Almodovar
Starring Antonio Banderas, Elena Anaya, Marisa Paredes, Jan Cornet

I first saw the trailer for Pedro Almodovar's The Skin I Live In at the Tyneside Cinema in Newcastle, while waiting patiently for Sarah's Key to start. The trailer was immensely creepy, and my immediate reaction was the exclamation: "Blimey! He's turned into Georges Franju!". It was through such a reaction that I was compelled to return the following week, to catch one of the most intriguing films of the year.If Black Swan was Darren Aronofsky's version of Suspiria, The Skin I Live In is Pedro Almodovar's take on Georges Franju's horror classic Eyes Without A Face. He takes the premise, plot and iconic imagery of what is still one of the scariest horror movies ever made, throws in his trademark blend of melodrama, gender politics and soap opera, and then cranks everything up to eleven. The result, like Black Swan, is frequently ridiculous, but also strange, engrossing and intensely memorable.Although precious little of his career has been based in or concerned with horror, Almodovar knows the genre well enough to pay knowing tribute to several iconic entries in the canon. The references to Eyes Without A Face are clear both in the film and in its publicity, especially in the white face mask which our heroine wears for most of the film. The plot loosely follows the same arc, although instead of stealing other people's faces, the obsessive mad scientist irrevocably alters a criminal's identity and gender as payback for what happened to his wife and daughter.Antonio Banderas' character looks back to the cinematic tradition of mad scientists, beginning of course with Rotwang from Metropolis. But his closest equivalent is Vincent Price in The Abominable Dr. Phibes, a campy, schlocky B-movie in which Price plays a zombie scientist who recreates the Biblical plagues of Egypt to avenge the death of his wife. Finally the surgical sequences, which are particularly graphic, recall the famous eye-slice sequence in Un Chien Andalou, whose surrealist sensibility mirrors Almodovar's interest in the supernatural.Mark Kermode remarked that one unique aspect of cinema is its ability to make acts of painstaking construction inherently seductive. In other words, watching someone assembling a gun or performing an operation on screen has an engrossing quality, so that we are drawn in even knowing that what we are seeing is, on one level, totally repulsive. If the surgical scenes in The Skin I Live In are anything to go by, Kermode was right on the money. There is something inherently sinister about surgical equipment on screen, but even as we recoil at what may (or may not) be happening, Almodovar's camera is coaxing us to lean in for a closer look.The Skin I Live In has a number of deeply uncomfortable scenes which in the hands of a lesser filmmaker would cause the whole project to collapse. The scenes of Vicente being hosed down and kept prisoner in the cellar are very close to the aesthetic of so-called torture porn. But even in its most tortuous moments the film never tips over into the territory of Captivity, i.e. condoning or encouraging any sadism on our part.A similar issue could be taken with the amount of nudity in the film, and particularly with the way in which it is presented. In one lengthy scene, Robert Ledgard (Banderas) begins to cover 'Vera' in the new skin which he has been cultivating. We see Vera's exposed breasts and genitalia in close up over a long take, while Robert guides the new material over her body with tweezers. As before, it's uncomfortable, but Almodovar holds his nerve and prevents the scene from becoming gratuitous through very careful editing.Like all the best horror films, The Skin I Live In is not gruesome or graphic for its own sake. It's very rare to get a horror film about gender politics, let alone one whose approach is so nuanced and intelligent. Where previous efforts like Teeth eventually abandoned or distorted their feminist credentials, this film puts its audience through the mill if it has t, in order to keep its sense of conviction.The film explores the notion of gender identity, and to what extent one's gender is defined by one's physical appearance. When Robert captures Vicente, wanting revenge for the rape of his daughter, the easy thing to do would be to castrate him, in the manner of Hard Candy or Teeth. Instead, Robert's retribution is more twisted, giving Vicente a vagina so that he has to experience some degree of womanhood for the rest of his life.After his daughter's death, brought on by a Repulsion-like fear of men, Robert takes his guinea pig a little further. What started as an act of retribution steadily transmutes into something a great deal more twisted, as Vicente is shaped into a near-perfect copy of Robert's wife, who is isolated from the outside world and used by Robert for sexual pleasure. In these scenes Robert truly emerges as a monster, who has forsaken the life-saving benefits of his research to satisfy his urges and atone for his mistakes.The film's exploration of gender identity is concentrated in the behaviour of 'Vera'. For most of the film we believe convincingly that she is wholly a woman - even before the massive twist, we don't have any reason to doubt that she identifies as such. Once we know what has been done to 'her', we come to believe that one's identity is indeed determined by physical factors. But as with Eyes Without A Face, the final rebellion turns all of this on its head, with 'Vera' revealing what or who she truly is in the gripping final scene.Like most of Almodovar's work, The Skin I Live In combines this twisted and sinister storyline with laugh-out-loud, awkward humour. The jokes frequently come at the expense of the characters involved, particularly 'Vera'. In one scene, Robert brings out a box of dildos of increasing size, and lays them out on the table while instructing his most prized possession about how and when to use each one. The camera then cuts to the line of dildos, with Vera looking startled behind her mask in the background.The Skin I Live In is at heart a melodrama: it has a relatively simple story (albeit one with a cracker of a twist), which relies on the memorability of the characters to give the story depth and credibility. Almodovar's characterisation is complex but very overt, and the manner in which he introduces characters tells us pretty much all we need to know. When we first meet Antonio Banderas, he is giving a lecture in which the lights cast deep shadows under his eyes: before he has even said a word, we know he is up to no good.Because The Skin I Live In is so deeply rooted in melodrama, it does require a lot of patience both to buy into the various twists and to put up with the more histrionic sections of the plot. Flashing back to events six years prior to the beginning works very well, but if you find yourself getting incredulous over the central plot device, you'll struggle to put up with the man dressed as a tiger. As with Black Swan, there is a sense of the ridiculous in all of this, but as long as we are in the zone with the characters, that sense should not override our enjoyment.The Skin I Live In is one of the most intriguing and engrossing films of 2011. It is a little too long, and we do have to hold our nerve in the more ridiculous moments. But with enough patience the substance and chills of Almodovar come surging through. Antonio Banderas gives his best performance in quite some time, and Elena Anaya is a great match, having previously shone in the underrated Savage Grace. It's a twisted, creepy and tantalising work, which in its finest moments gives Black Swan a run for its money.

Rating:
Verdict: The Spanish Black Swan

Bad Lieutenant (USA, 1992)
Directed by Abel Ferrara
Starring Harvey Keitel, Victor Argo, Frankie Thorn, Paul Hipp

Since attracting the wrath of the BBFC with his debut feature Driller Killer, Abel Ferrara has carved out a niche as one of the most difficult and uncompromising filmmakers of our time. His forthright personality off-screen is matched only by the hard-talking, macho nature of his films, which range from the gruesome rape revenge thriller Ms. 45 to the poignant but swaggering China Girl. In Bad Lieutenant, arguably his most audacious work, he gives us a film about guilt, redemption and unbearable human suffering, constructed around one of the greatest performances of the 1990s.Bad Lieutenant is a slow-burning, often thoughtful character study scripted by Zoe Lund, a model-turned-actress who starred in Ms. 45. It follows the tortured lifestyle of an unnamed New York police lieutenant who is deeply in debt to the mob through bets made on a baseball series. On top of his gambling addiction he is also a cocaine and heroin addict, who steals drugs from crime scenes to sell on the street so he can fund his other habit, namely women. In the midst of all this, somehow being able to keep his job, he is assigned to track down two men who have brutally raped a young nun, played by Frankie Thorn.For this kind of character to be believable, you need an actor with weight, experience and a threatening screen presence - and no-one meets those criteria better than Harvey Keitel. After a relatively quiet 1980s, Keitel was experiencing a revival with critical plaudits for his work on Thelma and Louise and Bugsy, the latter of which brought him his first (and so far only) Oscar nomination. Around the same time he played Mr. White in Reservoir Dogs, a role popularly perceived as his comeback. But out of the two this is the more remarkable performance, which makes any talk of a 'comeback' seem like damning with faint praise.Keitel's performance in Bad Lieutenant is one of the best of his career, up there with his early work on Mean Streets or The Duellists. He truly and painfully inhabits the nameless Lieutenant, giving a performance of such raw, unmitigated honesty that we empathise with him even in his most unspeakable moments. We genuinely feel the torture of the lieutenant as he descends further and further into hell on the streets of New York, faced with both his growing personal problems and a case which is impossible to solve. It's a performance of blood, sweat, tears and God knows what else, and the result is both frightening and heartbreaking.In terms of Keitel's back catalogue, the film to which Bad Lieutenant is closest is Taxi Driver. Martin Scorsese has almost admitted this comparison, including Bad Lieutenant on his list of Greatest Films of the 1990s. Both Travis Bickle and the Bad Lieutenant are driven, obsessive loners, who inhabit a world which is drowning in corruption and sin, and whose motivation comes from a desire to fight against the all-engulfing tide. But where Travis is positioned as God's lonely man, the Lieutenant has one foot firmly in hell and only gains complete moral conviction in the final stages of the film.Bad Lieutenant is at heart a story of Catholic redemption. Keitel is haunted by the mistakes he has made in the past, and his regrets are tempered by an admittance that it is all his fault. His bets with the mob's bookie become increasingly absurd, so that during the scene in the club the broker advises Keitel that it would be cheaper and easier just to have him killed. The Lieutenant's many years on the streets have made him incapable of forgiving people or understand the grace or mercy of God. When his nieces receive their first communion, he watches from a distance, unable to connect with either the service or the beliefs it upholds.There are a number of deeply striking sequences in Bad Lieutenant which convey the seemingly impossible prospect of redemption in the midst of all the horror unfolding on screen. The best and most extraordinary of these comes in the church, where Keitel questions the nun over her refusal to identify the men who raped her. She refuses to identify her attackers on the grounds that her rape raises the prospect of God's grace being bestowed on the two men. After she leaves, Keitel breaks down and see a vision of Christ standing in the church. He crawls along the floor, weeping and wailing, wanting to grasp the mysteries of God and forgiveness but being unable to reconcile that with his own shallow nature. It's an extraordinary scene in which the temporal and spiritual collide in a moment of pure passion and emotion, leaving the character devastated and the audience astonished.After coming out of his vision, Keitel manages to track down the two men who raped the nun, but rather than turning them in, he gives them all the money he has and puts them on the first bus out of town. He does so against his better judgement, but even while he berates himself as the bus drives away, he knows in his heart that it was the right thing to do. In these scenes the Lieutenant realises in practice the true grace and compassion of Christ, with his decision mirroring that of the nun; like Thomas in the Gospels, he believes because he has seen. The film ends with the Lieutenant being murdered in his car: what seems like a cruel accident could equally be a blessed release, with the Lieutenant finally reaching heaven having performed God's works here on Earth.Because Abel Ferrara started out as a grindhouse director, the spiritual aspects of Bad Lieutenant are not handled in a sugar-coated, airy-fairy way. Instead they come as ecstatic interludes to really brutal scenes involving nudity, violence and copious amounts of swearing, which earned the film an 18 certificate in the UK and a rare NC-17 in the States.The film contains several very realistic depictions of drug-taking. Ferrara shoots long, uninterrupted takes in which Keitel meets with his stick-thin dealer, and warms heroin on a spoon with a lighter before injecting it into his arm. In one of the very first scenes, Keitel uses a coke spoon immediately after dropping his young nephews off to school. These scenes are shot in such clinical detail as to make drug-taking about as unglamorous as you can get: as in Requiem for a Dream, the high of taking the drug is cancelled out or overridden by the immediately painful consequences.This discipline on Ferrara's part is equally present in the rape scene. Having previously made Ms. 45, Ferrara was well aware of the way such scenes would be structured in a duplicitous way: we almost tolerate the horrible violence because we are on the moral side of the victim and are goading her on to take revenge. But Bad Lieutenant doesn't fall into the kind of hideous duplicity present in I Spit On Your Grave. The rape scene focusses on the emotion of the nun and is intentionally repulsive. To reinforce the Christian element of the story, it is intercut with Christ on the cross, screaming as the nun screams. It's a shocking and original way of conveying the idea of Christ feeling every single pain and sin of mankind as He hung there on Good Friday.Most controversial of all is a scene halfway through Bad Lieutenant, in which Keitel pulls over two girls, to find that they are stoned and driving without a license. Rather than turn them in, he asks one of them to strip and the other to mimic oral sex while he masturbates outside the car. James Ferman, then-Head Censor of the BBFC, was asked on several occasions why he didn't cut that scene; he responded that it was so repulsive that no sane person could possibly find it arousing. The scene is repulsive and goes on a little too long, but it does at least reinforce the distance and desperation of the Lieutenant, and arguably a graphic sex scene with girls half his age would be the greater of two evils.There are flaws with Bad Lieutenant which prevent it from being a masterpiece. Even as we invest so deeply in Keitel's performance, we can't help wondering why he has been able to stay on the force all this time. He makes next to no effort to cover up his behaviour, and it seems a little far-fetched that even his seasoned colleagues would turn such a blind eye. As the character study deepens, the crime plot becomes almost totally peripheral, and in its weaker moments it can feel like Ferrara is testing our mettle for its own sake, seeing how much nastiness we can take before bringing back the plot to give us relief.In the end, however, Bad Lieutenant rises above these flaws as a triumphant example of how exploitation cinema can explore serious ideas, in ways which are often more insightful and frequently more provocative than its mainstream equivalents. Keitel is outstanding in the title role, and Ferrara's direction is both merciless and mesmerising. It's a very tough watch for those not familiar with Ferrara or the traditions he has espoused throughout this career. But for those who can go the distance, it is a deeply moving piece of work.

Rating:
Verdict: Slow-burning, tough and profound

Watchmen (USA, 2009)
Directed by Zack Snyder
Starring Jackie Earle Haley, Patrick Wilson, Malin Akerman, Matthew Goode

Big-screen adaptations of Alan Moore's work have been a decidedly mixed bag, from the enjoyable V for Vendetta to the flawed From Hell and the excremental The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen. In bringing what is considered Moore's finest work to the big screen, Zack Snyder has made every effort to do justice to the graphic novel and satisfy the fans. But the finished project is found severely wanting in crucial areas, resulting in either a big, long folly or a missed opportunity.
Of all the Alan Moore adaptations, Watchmen has the longest and most troubled production history. The film was first mooted in the early-1990s when Terry Gilliam was approached by Sam Hamm, who had recently achieved success writing Tim Burton's Batman. Despite being initially interested, Gilliam concluded that the novel could only work as a TV mini-series; he left the project and Hamm's script was indefinitely shelved.The project re-emerged in 2001 with a new script by David Hayter, which lay around for three years before Darren Aronofsky was attached to direct. He subsequently dropped out to make pet project The Fountain, and his replacement Paul Greengrass did the same a few months later, in order to make United 93. Snyder was first offered the project in late-2005, shortly after his success with the remake of Dawn of the Dead. The project was formally green-lit in 2007 after shooting wrapped on 300.There is no doubt that Snyder and everyone involved in Watchmen wanted this to be the best possible adaptation of the novel. This is in spite of the fact that Alan Moore has disowned it, along with all other adaptations of his work (and looking at The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen, it's not hard to see why). Various stories have circulated about the cast having copies of the novel on set, so that it could be referred to directly whenever there were questions over plot or characters. The film was clearly made for the fans and not for the money: with an 18 certificate and a budget of $130m, no expense or effort has been spared to replicate the comics as closely as possible.But in spite of this obvious affection, there are a number of big problems with Watchmen which render it at least a partial failure. The first and biggest problem is that Snyder is a fanboy. He loves the comic to such an obsessive degree that either he can't explain it to the rest of us, or he isn't willing to explain it.As a result the story of Watchmen is largely impenetrable to anyone who didn't spend their teenage years immersed in comic books. Snyder is focussed so much on meeting fans' expectations that the backstories or reasoning of the characters gets buried or lost, not to mention the mechanics of the alternative universe they inhabit. This is particularly the case with Doctor Manhattan, whose origins are only touched upon about halfway through the film.The second, deeper problem is with Snyder as a director. He is not the "visionary" that he is made out to be, being visually stylish but a very poor storyteller. While the novel is purported to have substance coming out of its ears, the film gives the impression that it is all surface and no depth, amounting to little more than people in latex hitting each other. One could say on these grounds that Snyder is the new Joel Schumacher - and for all its disinterest in the comics, Batman Forever is a better film.On top of his irritating use of slow-motion, most of Snyder's visual decisions smack of impatience, incompetence or showing off. His impatience is seen in the constant cutting between multiple, similar angles in scenes which would flow much better with longer, simpler takes. His incompetence is found in beginner's-level mistakes: he shoots several scenes through windows, resulting in lens flare or distracting reflections. And his showing-off is evident in Veidt's interview being reflected through a lens of another camera, or a sex scene being captured through the glasses on the table. In each example the visual decisions are an unnecessary indulgence which contribute little, and in many cases detract from and undermine the story.Regardless of how complex or multi-layered the story of Watchmen is, it does not require two-and-a-half-hours to be told. On the one hand, it feels like the film always wants more time to develop the characters, and Gilliam was probably right that it would have worked better as a miniseries. On the other hand, if Snyder was determined to make a manageable film, he would have accepted the necessary compressions and moved the character development forward. But he doesn't do this, at least not as much or as well as he should. We have to wait nearly two hours for things to come together with the twist involving Ozymandias and Doctor Manhattan, by which time most of us will have given up.So much of Watchmen is window-dressing, confirming Snyder's pursuit of style over everything else. Rorschach's film noir narration might work in the comics, but it serves little to no purpose here: the end point involving the discovery of his journal is silly, and it does nothing to move the plot forward other than stating the obvious. Snyder's choice of pop songs on the soundtrack is lazy, particularly in the opening montage: he settles for Bob Dylan's 'The Times They Are A-Changin' where Quentin Tarantino would have put on something more entertainingly esoteric.This feeling of superficiality, coupled with the unrelenting pursuit of style, causes all of the arresting themes of Watchmen to get buried. In fact, the story raises a number of interesting issues about the ethics of nuclear war and peace, the workings of mutually assured destruction, and in particular the role of "costumed heroes" and how they could be controlled or policed. The slogan "Who Watches the Watchmen?" recurs as graffiti throughout the film but is barely addressed in a constructive way.The tone of Watchmen keeps flipping between flippant and portentous, with Snyder being unable to balance the dark or forbidding elements with the inherent silliness of a naked floating blue man. This is perfectly demonstrated by a scene halfway through on Night Owl's ship: Silk Spectre II makes a comment about impending nuclear war, which then cuts to her and Night Owl making love in their costumes. Such lurches in tone are akin to erotic fan fiction and threaten to drag the whole film into parody.Because the flippant aspects of Watchmen are so prominent, scenes which are meant to be more thought-provoking lose much of their impact. During the scenes involving Richard Nixon, what sticks in your mind is not the threat of global destruction but his comedy rubber nose, which makes the war room scenes feel less like Dr. Strangelove than Spitting Image. More problematically, when the film has a near-rape sequence, or a child abduction, or any number of brutally gruesome deaths, Snyder can't pull himself together: he can't deliver the emotion punch that such scenes require to prevent them from seeming inexcusably adolescent.Watchmen is a deeply flawed, over-long and often boring attempt to bring Alan Moore's vision to the big screen. Whatever the merits of the graphic novel, and regardless of his good intentions, Snyder was the wrong director and this adaptation will put many newcomers off the source material. It pales in comparison to both V for Vendetta and Christopher Nolan's Batman films, both as a comic adaptation and an attempt to explore serious political issues. Fanboys will leap to its defence, but everyone else will be bored, annoyed or confused.

Rating:
Verdict: A deeply frustrating failure

Black Swan (USA, 2011)
Directed by Darren Aronofsky
Starring Natalie Portman, Vincent Cassel, Mila Kunis, Barbara Hershey

What is it about ballet and madness that continues to entrance filmmakers? In the 1940s we had The Red Shoes, Powell and Pressburger's masterful look at art, love, jealousy and fantasy set against the backdrop of a ballet company. In the 1970s we had Suspiria, Dario Argento's brutal masterpiece about the fate of a young ballerina modelled on Snow White. And now we have Black Swan from Darren Aronofsky, one of the maddest and most unrelenting films you will see all year.Aronofsky has always been an uncompromising director, having put his audiences through the mill with Requiem for a Dream and tested their patience with The Fountain (think Terrence Malick in space, only not as good). Black Swan continues this trend, beginning at a point of nerve-shredding intensity and never letting you relax until our heroine lies bleeding at the end. In the hands of a less confident director, the film's shrieking intensity and over-cranked visual style would have made the finished project nothing short of ridiculous. But for all the elements which don't quite work, it somehow holds together, for good or bad, as something genuinely jaw-dropping.As so often happens, the release of Black Swan has prompted a discussion about the nature of its subject matter, specifically over how realistic is its depiction of ballet, both physically and psychologically. On the first point, the film is one of the best in recent memory at putting dancing up on screen. Natalie Portman and Mila Kunis went through six months of intense training for the roles, so that they physical resemble ballerinas as well as being able to do most of their own dancing. Aronofsky does not rely overly on editing to show the best possible version of a given routine, giving us a sense of scale which Rob Marshall's works do not.Ultimately, however, to focus on whether or not Black Swan accurately depicts the world of ballet is to somewhat miss the point. The film is much more of a study of a character in disintegration, about the physical and emotional consequences that come from devotion to one's art, and how such devotion can quickly tip over into obsession and delusion. The film's status as a full-on visual experience is mitigated only by the deep emotional attachment we have for the central character, who appears in every frame and is the only thing we have approaching a reliable narrator.

In both its subject matter and execution, Black Swan is a deeply cine-literate film which references a whole host of other works. It is at heart a genre piece, combining elements of psychological and expressionist horror with the character study elements of an introspective thriller. This does not denigrate or compromise the boldness of Aronofsky's vision, but it is worth being aware of these references as a means of explaining and responding to the film.The film owes a large debt to the works of Powell and Pressburger, particularly The Red Shoes and Black Narcissus. Like the former, it is not so much a film about ballet as a film about personal trauma which just happens to have ballet in it. It is every bit as melodramatic (in the best possible way) and similar themes are explored, such as the jealousy of the various dancers and the way in which the pursuit of perfection leads to hallucination or fantasy.

Both films are striking in their use of colour, from the strobe-red lighting in the nightclub to the beaming white stage lamps during the actual performance. But where Powell goes for wide-eyed, almost childlike fantasy, Aronofsky is much more lurid in approach, playing up the sexual currents in the story rather more. After a fundraising evening, Vincent Cassel tells Natalie Portman to lighten up by going home and touching herself, and earlier on he dismisses her attempts at dancing the Black Swan as un-seductive, adding that her male colleagues wouldn't look at her twice.Stripped of all its trappings, Black Swan is a relatively simple story about the conflict between light and darkness and the need to be in touch with the latter. Nina's physical conflict is plain to see; aside from all the shots of her skeletal body, the film devotes many painful frames to splitting toenails, cracking feet and disguising the strange rashes on her shoulder blades. But like Black Narcissus, Aronofsky's main means of expressing the difference between dark and light is through an exploration of sexuality.The relationship between Nina and Lily is to a large extent a restaging of the clash in Black Narcissus between Sisters Clodagh and Ruth. In their confrontation towards the end of the film, these two are offered up to us as two opposing sides of womanhood, with the latter being driven almost to madness by her overt sexualisation and the former being stymied by her desire for purity. Nina's purity is not only physical (she is a virgin) but technical, which in the end prevents her from being a great dancer as opposed to a very good one. Lily meanwhile has all the wild spirit and seduction needed to be great, but she turns up late, picks up strangers and parties all night long.While this dichotomy works well, it is ironically in its most lurid aspects that the film begins to come apart. Even if we accept the hysterical tone of the film, certain moments still feel out of place or overdone. The scene of the dirty old man eyeing up Nina on the train is very uncomfortable and far too literal-minded in a film which is trying to be symbolic. And then there is the hallucinatory lesbian sex between Nina and Lily, which represents the same act of symbolic self-love of Betty and Rita in Mulholland Drive. But whereas in David Lynch's film that scene felt relatively substantial, in Black Swan it doesn't feel quite so essential, and its ability to titillate certain audience members threatens to drag the whole story into route-one exploitation.Fortunately, the film redeems itself by not letting these wobbles undercut the general narrative. It drifts between fantasy and reality so seamlessly that the barriers between them eventually crumble, so that by the last 20 minutes, you no longer have the luxury of knowing what is real and what is not. This forces you to trust Nina, so that whatever happens on screen becomes reality in that moment and cannot be solidly questioned. No other film could string together the body-horror metamorphosis of David Cronenberg's The Fly and the blood-drenched giallo of Suspiria, two traditions which on paper are miles apart.This portion of Black Swan highlights the biggest debt of the film, which is to the work of Dario Argento; Mark Kermode famously described the ending of Black Swan as "Dario Argento on crack". Suspiria runs throughout these scenes, with the bitchy chorus line standing in for the coven of witches plotting our heroine's downfall, and Lily's alternate taking the place of the mother witch whom she must defeat. The colour palette is stretched to the outer limits, with the blood and Black Narcissus eyes being the same Day Glo red as the blood as Argento's work. For all the well-executed mirror tricks and CGI doppelgangers, this is the moment in which the film fully takes flight.Black Swan is an utterly mad film which manages somehow to hang together in the face of many striking and rivalling elements. Its closest comparison from a structural viewpoint is The Man Who Fell to Earth: many scenes are indulgent, or uncomfortable, or downright unnecessary, but the overall effect is quite profound. Natalie Portman gives her best performance in a decade, banishing the memories of the Star Wars prequels and hinting at a possible new maturity in her line of work. It's not perfect, or entirely satisfying, but it remains a truly frightening experience.

Rating: 4/5
Verdict: Breathtakingly bonkers