Nina is overwhelmed by a feeling of immense pressure when she finds herself competing for the role, causing her to lose her tenuous grip on reality and descend into madness.

Aronofsky conceived the premise by connecting his viewings of a production of Swan Lake with an unrealized screenplay about understudies and the notion of being haunted by a double, similar to the folklore surrounding doppelgängers.

Upon release, the film received positive reviews from critics, with praise toward Aronofsky's direction and the performances of Portman, Kunis, and Hershey.

At a gala celebrating the new season, an intoxicated Beth publicly accuses Nina of providing sexual favors to Thomas in return for the role.

Towards the end of the ballet's second act, Nina is distracted by a hallucination and loses her balance during a lift, causing a male dancer to drop her, infuriating Thomas.

Darren Aronofsky first became interested in ballet when his sister studied dance at the High School of Performing Arts in New York City.

The basic idea for the film started when he hired screenwriters to rework a screenplay called The Understudy, which portrayed off-Broadway actors and explored the notion of being haunted by a double.

[5] When researching for the production of Black Swan, Aronofsky found ballet to be "a very insular world" whose dancers were "not impressed by movies".

[6] Portman explained being part of Black Swan, "I'm trying to find roles that demand more adulthood from me because you can get stuck in a very awful cute cycle as a woman in film, especially being such a small person.

He compared his character to George Balanchine, who co-founded New York City Ballet and was "a control freak, a true artist using sexuality to direct his dancers".

Sarah Lane, a soloist at ABT, did the heavy tricks, she did the fouettés, but they only had her for a limited time, a couple of weeks, so I did the rest of whatever dance shots they needed.

[6] He told her about a love scene between competing ballet dancers, and Portman recalled, "I thought that was very interesting because this film is in so many ways an exploration of an artist's ego and that narcissistic sort of attraction to yourself and also repulsion with yourself.

"[23] The screenplay The Understudy was written by Andres Heinz; Aronofsky first heard about it while editing his second film Requiem for a Dream (2000) and described it as "All About Eve with a double, set in the off-Broadway world."

"[24] When Aronofsky proposed a detailed outline of Black Swan to Universal Pictures, the studio decided to fast-track development of the project in January 2007.

"[24] By June 2009, Universal had placed the project in turnaround, generating attention from other studios and specialty divisions, particularly with actress Portman attached to star.

"[38] Black Swan screened in competition and is the third consecutive film directed by Aronofsky to premiere at the festival, following The Fountain (2006) and The Wrestler.

Black Swan had a limited release in select cities in North America on December 3, 2010, in 18 theaters[49] and was a surprise box office success.

[3] Black Swan received positive reviews from critics upon release, with praise toward Aronofsky's direction and the performances of Portman, Kunis and Hershey.

The website's critical consensus reads, "Bracingly intense, passionate, and wildly melodramatic, Black Swan glides on Darren Aronofsky's bold direction—and a bravura, tour-de-force performance from Natalie Portman.

"[57] Leonard Maltin, on his blog Movie Crazy, admitted that he "couldn't stand" the film, despite highly praising Portman's performance.

"[60] Kurt Loder of Reason called the film "wonderfully creepy", and wrote that "it's not entirely satisfying; but it's infused with the director's usual creative brio, and it has a great dark gleaming look.

Goodridge described Portman's performance, "[She] is captivating as Nina ... she captures the confusion of a repressed young woman thrown into a world of danger and temptation with frightening veracity."

He wrote, "[Black Swan] is an instant guilty pleasure, a gorgeously shot, visually complex film whose badness is what's so good about it.

You might howl at the sheer audacity of mixing mental illness with the body-fatiguing, mind-numbing rigors of ballet, but its lurid imagery and a hellcat competition between two rival dancers is pretty irresistible."

The critic said of the thematic mashup, "Aronofsky ... never succeeds in wedding genre elements to the world of ballet ... White Swan/Black Swan dynamics almost work, but the horror-movie nonsense drags everything down the rabbit hole of preposterousness.

[64] Vulture's Kyle Buchanan also noted the similarities of the film's plot to the widely derided Showgirls, and said that the director Darren Aronofsky "owes a feather-tip to Paul Verhoeven's exploitation classic more than [he] might be willing to admit".

Upon the film's release in the United Kingdom, The Guardian interviewed four professional ballet dancers in the UK: Tamara Rojo, Lauren Cuthbertson, Edward Watson, and Elena Glurjidze.

"[68] Several critics noted striking similarities between Satoshi Kon's 1997 anime film Perfect Blue and Aronofsky's Black Swan.

Westcott said: "Controversy is too complimentary a word for two people using their considerable self-publicising resources to loudly complain about their credit once they realized how good the film is.

[16] In a March 3 blog entry for Dance Magazine, editor-in-chief Wendy Perron asked: "Do people really believe that it takes only one year to make a ballerina?