Thank you for posting this. I love Natalie Portman but felt the movie was an excuse to make a horror film. It therefore did not emotionally involve me as much I felt it might have. The story itself, while movie-esque, is not so far-fetched as to be totally unbelievable to me, but instead of it being a character study of a talented but fragile woman it somehow withheld too much in order to hype the climax and to mislead me about her.

Thanks for posting my little review about this movie in the body of your text here. I truly appreciate your comment about a possible career in criticism.

After reading about your own reactions to the film I had a thought about the “fake hushed reverence” you refer to. I believe that the ending is so super-serious, in a way that was perhaps unexpected, that even those who laughed might have felt taken off guard, as if afraid to feel they might not have understood what was truly happening. After all, the Portman character was supposed to be hallucinating, wasn’t she? Perhaps some people all of sudden felt they had missed the point of something. Perhaps they weren’t supposed to care about what was real and what wasn’t? Yet, if the film had succeeded there wouldn’t be these kinds of questions. Given all the action leading up to the ending it seems that the last scene should have been obvious in its resolution