Black Swan, its cast and crew apparently scheduled to be showered with Academy Awards and such, is the second Aronofsky film — the first being The Wrestler — that’s left me wondering what everyone else is seeing that I’m not.

The Wrestler seemed like a reasonably-decent character drama, nothing more, yet people were falling over themselves to praise it. I don’t begrudge this; there are plenty of films that make everyone giddy but I sit there bewildered. With Black Swan, I’m even more perplexed. What could have been an interesting portrayal on obsession in art is undermined by cliched characters and the bare minimum of a plot.

Almost every character comes straight out of the pages of Female Stereotypes for Male Screenwriters and you’ll have seen them all in dozens of films before. There’s the Embittered Older Performer, no longer the favourite, humiliatingly retired in favour of the fresh young thing. Naturally, being old — she’s, like, 35 or some other hideous, past-it age — she’s unable to cope and turns to alcoholic self-destruction.

There’s the Highly-Strung Mother that resents her child for forcing an end to her life as a dancer, and who now grooms her daughter to have the career she never had, aggressively trimming her fingernails and silently watching her sleep at night. At one point she hysterically attempts to imprison her daughter, which is a very normal, natural thing for a mother to do, right?

There’s the daughter who’s about 25 or something but still sleeps in a cute bedroom festooned with stuffed animals to indicate that she’s CHILD-LIKE and INNOCENT and has no idea of the POWER of her VAGINA until she’s encouraged to finger herself by her male director, at which point she transforms into a slutty lesbian who DANCES IN A NIGHTCLUB and then has heavily-signposted hallucinations. This is all ok though, because it allows her to play the part of the Black Swan with a slight smirk that wasn’t there before. This gets her a literal thumbs up. Phew!

Mila Kunis plays Lily, the smouldering counterpart to Natalie Portman’s frigid Nina. You can tell that Lily is TROUBLE because she WEARS HER HAIR DOWN and has TATTOOS and turns up A FEW MINUTES LATE FOR REHEARSAL. She even — whisper it! — TAKES DRUGS and SMOKES. She’s basically Hitler.

There isn’t a single sympathetic, relatable character here other than Lily who appears to be at least mostly normal — but then, she’s also simply an underwritten foil for Nina to be jealous of. Am I supposed to empathise with the antagonist over the protagonist? I’m not sure that’s right. There are no character arcs to speak of aside from Nina’s newfound ability to dance slightly floppier than she did earlier. Everyone is either an emotional wreck from the start of the film to the end, or they’re Vincent Cassel.

Sloppy characterisation to one side, all the film has left to offer is some tame body horror — bleeding fingernails, for instance — and some entry-level mindfuckery that won’t shock anyone who’s seen Fight Club or Sixth Sense or any number of other mainstream reality-bending films. It’s all been done before, and better, not just by other directors — Cronenberg for instance — but by Aronofsky himself. Where is the man behind Pi, Requiem for a Dream and The Fountain?

Requiem for a Dream is brutal with its graphic portrayal of drug addiction and mental and physical collapse. Black Swan instead shows us a girl with itchy shoulders. There are probably interesting stories to be told about artistic obsession, but they’re not to be found here.