I asked only because I was curious what moved you to review it.

Admittedly, my explication of why it might be at SF Signal might not have been all that clear, so perhaps I should reiterate. Reading the last two sentences of the second paragraph we find:

“…Black Swan, with its emphasis on sexuality, dark surrealism and the world of art, seems transliterated from an unwritten story not yet collected in a killer horror anthology edited by Ellen Datlow. Make no mistake: for all of its indie drama cred, Black Swan is a horror movie, though its horrors are the Second Stream ones explicated by Kathryn Cramer in her introductory essay of David Hartwell’s The Dark Descent. Psychological terror in the tradition of Roman Polanski’s Repulsion or the works of Dennis Etchison rather than the overtly supernatural.”

So no, Black Swan is not science fiction no matter how fluidly you might define it. (Charlie Jane Anders of io9 called it “a fascinating genre mash-up,” though I think it is less a mash-up and more overt.) But it is a horror movie directed by somebody who is quite familiar with the conventions of the fantastique (as Clive Barker would call it; John Clute has opted for the term fantastika, which I prefer), and as such is of genre interest. (In this regard, it’s a little like William Gibson’s novel Zero History.) I reference the anthology The Dark Descent edited by David G. Hartwell, implying that the movie would be perfectly at home in its pages if it was prose. (If you haven’t read that doorstop of a book, do so. It’s one of the finest anthologies you’re likely to find, second only to Great Tales of Terror and the Supernatural edited by Wise and Wagner.)

Keep in mind, too, that very few of the movies reviewed here are science fiction. Indeed, off the top of my head, I can only think of a handful of movies I sat through as science fiction: from Inception, Monsters (on the high end), Tron: Legacy and Repo Men (on the low) and Splice (scraping the very bottom). Toy Story 3, Tim Burton’s remake of Alice in Wonderland and Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows: Part I are fantasies. Kick-Ass is a superhero satire. Prince of Persia: The Sands of Time is an adaptation of a videogame. The Losers is a spy-fi entry, though its MacGuffin edges it into science fiction territory. The Wolfman, Let Me In and Shutter Island are horror movies. (Actually, come to think of it, Shutter Island also deals with the breakdown of reality, though when I wrote that review no one questioned its inclusion at SF Signal.) Perhaps I could stick to straight science fiction movies, but it would mean excluding most of the movie reviews I write for this site…which, depending on your point of view, might not be such a bad thing.

I took it that the main character was massively delusional.

JeffV

The Red Shoes was done in an era when women did have limited choices.  To see this film passing as novel and edgy in 2011 is nothing short of disheartening.