Awarded the coveted role of the Swan Queen in a bold retelling of "Swan Lake," fragile ballet dancer Nina Sayers (a gaunt Natalie Portman) has her perfectionism tested by company director Thomas Leroy (Vincent Cassel); to achieve the duality of her role - that of the virginal White Swan and the cursed Black Swan - Thomas challenges Nina to explore herself, literally and figuratively. Nina must first contend with her controlling live-in mother (Barbara Hershey), a former ballerina with her own obsessive dark streak, and the company's latest dancer, Lily (Mila Kunis), whose machinations seem to be set on undermining and eliminating Nina. Increasingly, Nina's reality begins to fray, and she is haunted by nightmarish visions and manipulations until she inevitably comes face-to-face with her own unfurling sanity.

Duality is explored not merely through Nina's role, symbolic color, or the motif of mirrored reflections; the characters surrounding Nina are shadows of herself, representing the internal tension within her struggle to become the Black Swan. Lily is Black Swan incarnate, simultaneously conjuring Nina's latent sensuality and incurring Nina's jealous anger through her nonchalant exercise of sexual power; she is the archetypal whore to Nina's archetypal virgin to which Nina is both drawn and repelled. Where Nina hides away her scratches behind a white shawl, Lily's exposed back is marked by black wings, tattoos that writhe and pulsate during their sexual encounter. Thomas is the Oedipal Father, a figure of authority that elicits Nina's sexuality while simultaneously withholding validation; conversely, Nina's mother is chasteness and innocence but simultaneously isolation and imprisonment, locking Nina away in a room of plush toys and polka dots to preserve forever her White Swan. Beth MacIntyre is the embodiment of everything Nina fears inevitable about her future, a life razed by the decay of age, failure, and Cronenbergian body horror; even if Nina becomes the Black Swan, will she escape a fate as nothing more than an interchangeable "Little Princess"?

How does one achieve perfection through the contradictions? How can Nina Sayers embody the White Swan and the Black Swan? The virgin and the whore? This is the tension that consumes Nina Sayers and ultimately drives her mad - yet even her madness does not seem definite. In "killing" Lily, Nina drove the glass shard into herself - herself as the White Swan; in her performance, she literally becomes the Black Swan, emboldening her to passionately kiss Thomas. Though the film ends with Nina bleeding out to the sound of uproarious applause and her own self-acceptance ("I was perfect"), the fade to white suggests a transition; has Nina died or has merely a part of Nina died?

"Black Swan" is, above all else, a psychological character study. It isn't necessarily uncharted territory for Aronofsky, whose previous film, "The Wrestler," was similarly the subjective reality of Randy "The Ram" Robinson, and he utilized vibrant Expressionism in his drug abuse opus "Requiem for a Dream." With "Black Swan," Aronofsky delves deeper into the dark, particularly with such robust use of the doppelgänger; so clearly does this device allow Aronofsky to represent facets of duality but to also underscore Nina's increasing paranoia of being undermined and replaced, both literally (as the Swan Queen) and metaphorically. You'd have to be daft to miss the mirror motif throughout the film, but it serves many visual purposes from internally framing characters to indicate a sense of claustrophobia, indicating a state of mind, separating characters visually to indicate conflict or tension, suggesting duplicity, and, oh yes, let's not forget, finally serve as a weapon. Following that scene - when Nina truly transforms on stage - that Aronofsky's work really shines, moving beautifully, with an excellent crescendo on the part of Natalie Portman; the Swan Queen's make-up is mesmerizing and more than a little frightening, accompanied by a visceral thrill in Nina's transformation to power and dominance. To his credit, Aronofsky made an excellent choice in casting Portman simply because so many of the actress' roles have been so restrained; it makes Nina's arc more fundamentally believable. Likewise, Mila Kunis, not typically one for dramatic roles (no one - not even Kunis - wants to count 2008's "Max Payne"), really excels in effortlessly gliding from flippant and sultry to downright sinister.

Make no mistake, "Black Swan" is not a film for everyone. There are sequences of horror, including the aforementioned body-horror than includes finger-length hangnails being torn off, split toenails, and bleeding fingers, to say nothing of the phantasms Nina witnesses as she spirals into insanity. Similarly, there's the oft-mentioned Nina and Lily dalliance that might offend more conservative viewers as well as some recreational drug use. However, if you've got more than a passing interest in Freudian psychology, familiarity with director Satoshi Kon's film "Perfect Blue," or share in my amusement that Fox Searchlight successfully turned "psychosexual" into a marketing buzzword with this film, chances are you'll enjoy the demented spectacle of "Black Swan." Also worth noting is that the vulgar old man Nina encounters on the subway - if you've seen the film, you know the one - is played by the same actor who uttered one of the most unsettling but memorable lines of "Requiem for a Dream": "Ass to ass!"

Finally, though, we should collectively thank "Black Swan" for offering, above all else, something no other film I've ever seen has offered: the opportunity to watch a ballerina drag a corpse into a closet. That's worth at least a matinee ticket, right?