Photo by Emma Hadley
Through a career that includes It Follows, Longlegs, and much more, Maika Monroe has made a name for herself as one of the most important horror performers of the past decade. So when Monroe recommends a horror film, we tend to listen, and that includes her obsession with one of the most unsettling movies of the 2010s: Black Swan.
On the red carpet to promote her new film 100 Nights of Hero, Letterboxd asked Monroe for her four favorite queer films. She recommended others, including Queer, Portrait of a Lady on Fire, and Moonlight, but we naturally want to know what horror films Monroe considers queer classics, and she listed Darren Aronofsky’s 2010 film without hesitation.
“Black Swan,” she said. “I’m obsessed.” Now, the film is available to stream on Hulu.
Courtesy of Searchlight Pictures
It’s easy to see why. Black Swan, which celebrates its 15th anniversary this month, is a paranoid descent into psychosexual transformation, and one of Aronofsky’s most unnerving movie experiences. The film follows Nina (Natalie Portman), a ballerina auditioning for the lead role in Swan Lake in New York City. It’s a dual role, one in which she’ll have to play both the white and black swans, and she struggles with the darker second role, even as stress pushes her various hyperfixations into overdrive. Things get worse when Lily (Mila Kunis), another dancer, emerges as a potential challenger for the role. Overwhelmed by the pressure, Nina descends into a world of mirrors, doppelgangers, and hallucinations, even as she gets dangerously, intimately close with Nina.
If you love psychological horror, Black Swan has just about everything you could want. Portman and Kunis are fantastic, as is Vincent Cassel as the ballet company’s lascivious director. Aronofsky directs with the same fevered style that won him fans with Requiem for a Dream years earlier, and the body horror elements, from cuticle picking to the sensation that Nina is growing feathers, are on point. I remember seeing this film in a Houston theater where a toddler in light-up shoes kept running up and down the aisles, and it somehow did nothing to dim my experience. It’s just that gripping.
The contemporary response to Black Swan was massive. The film finished the year on many Top 10 lists, and ended up with five Oscar nominations, winning Portman her only Best Actress statue so far. In his review at the time, Dread Central’s Paul Nicholasi called it “an incredible achievement in cinema,” and 15 years later, that’s still true. No wonder Maika Monroe loves it.
Black Swan is now streaming on Hulu.
Categorized: Streaming News
