It turns out that Nina hallucinated the fight with (and subsequent murder of) Lily, and actually stabbed herself while in the throes of a psychotic episode. But this doesn't stop Nina from performing the role she's worked so hard to attain. Bleeding, she returns to the stage to perform the last act of the show.
The final twist reveals that Nina had hallucinated Lily's death and instead stabbed herself in the abdomen. However, given the artist she is, she continues performing the ballet's final act as a dying Odette, landing on a mattress with thunderous applause.
She hallucinates and becomes increasingly paranoid throughout the film. Her eating is disordered and she practices self-harm. She is anxious, moody, and temperamental. Nina is fixated on the romantic tragedy of Swan Lake and she ultimately kills herself in tribute to it.
The viewer learns early on that Nina struggles with several issues, including obsessions with dancing and perfectionism, as well as an eating disorder. Additionally, Nina lives with her mother who also displays elements of mental illness, including narcissistic personality and depressive features.
In each scene where the two are together, the mother is always domineering. She is either picking Nina's life apart or overly coddling her. Early in the film the audience is shown a small rash on Nina's back; this has to do with a nervous tick she has developed where she scratches herself.
The night before she is set to perform, Nina becomes convinced that Lily is going to take her place. Her paranoia and mental strain cause her to hallucinate that she's physically turning into the role of Odile, the Black Swan, complete with red eyes and black feathers protruding from bird-like skin.
Nina says they're nothing but a rash and her mother becomes angry and hints that Nina hasn't scratched herself like this since she was younger, and she thought Nina was over this. Nina tries to brush her off but her mother grabs her hand and takes her to the bathroom to cut her fingernails with scissors.
She envisions the black swan version of herself on multiple occasions. She has fantasy encounters with her understudy Lily (Mila Kunis), one where they are romantic and another where Nina appears to kill her. However, the latter is when Nina actually appears to stab herself.
NOT REAL: Therefore, Lilly and Nina did not have actual sex (we know this because after sex, Lilly said something to Nina about being a ‘Good girl’ and then tried to smother her. Not real!)
Lily was the evil twin and the director of the play was the prince, Lily was seducing the director (Thomas) but Nina becomes the black swan and seduces him but ended up killing herself to finally free herself from the constant burden she puts on herself to be perfect all the time.
Destruction of the body is the basis of all horror, but Black Swan's body horror serves a dual purpose by not only freaking out the viewer but also using symbolism to represent the decline of Nina's mental state. Though it isn't as overt as most other horror films, Black Swan is no less terrifying.
She stole them because she was trying to acquire an aspect of Beth herself. Wearing them gave Nina a sense of power and achievement. She psychologically steals these feelings from Beth because Nina couldn't develop those qualities within her own self.
Nina's increasing neuroses are manifested in a bizarre, unconscious kind of self-mutilation. Repeatedly she picks at the skin around her fingernails and scratches her back viciously. She has awful hallucinations in which she sees herself tearing bloody strips of skin away from her fingers.
Nina has a huge ambition to be Swan Queen; however, she still finds difficulty to play as the Black Swan. Anxiety disorder becomes one of the causes of Nina's schizophrenia. It happens when Nina always feels anxious because of her ambitions to become a Swan Queen.
It isn't clear if it is real or if Nina was the one who did it — the latter is more likely. When she returns the things she took from Beth's (Winona Ryder) dressing room, the shoe knife becomes a weapon of self-harm, as Beth repeatedly stabs herself in the face.
Lily hugs Nina before Nina completely closes the door. Nina then turns around and looks at Lily, locking their eyes with even more sexual hunger than before. Nina then rushes to Lily and starts passionately french kissing with her.
The broken mirror symbolizes that she is no longer a victim to the black swan and that she is in control of its dark power. As the corruption of the Black Swan effected her mentally, emotionally, and spiritually, the transformation attributed to her fall as the White Swan that was completely diminished.
Black Swan became a 2010 American psychological thriller film directed by Darren Aronofsky and starring Natalie Portman, Vincent Cassel and Mila Kunis. Its plot revolves around the true story of Nina Sayers. Production of Tchaikovsky's Swan Lake ballet by a prestigious New York City company.
There are 139 dance shots in the film. 111 are Natalie Portman untouched. 28 are her dance double Sarah Lane. If you do the math, that's 80% Natalie Portman.
Aronofsky clearly enriches the film with a storyline that points to Nina's first psychotic break, likely triggered by a combination of her genetic heritability, childhood experience of abuse, age, and the heightened environmental stress placed upon her as principal ballerina.
She thinks she has killed Lily and dragged her body out of sight in the dressing room. However, it turns out Lily is fine. In reality, Nina has stabbed herself in the abdomen with a shard of broken glass.
(at around 1h 22 mins) In Winona Ryder's final scene in the movie, where she is in the hospital with metal bars in her legs following her catastrophic accident and Nina returns the items she stole from Beth's room, Beth appears to go insane and stab herself graphically in the face right in front of Nina.
