Inevitably, this sudden reversal in fortunes creates bad blood and bitter rivalry.ĭevastated at suddenly becoming the weaker half in a glamorous power couple, Darling begins shadowing Frans at rehearsals, slowly engineering control over Polly with subtle bullying, barbed comments and queasy sexual overtures. The Giselle role falls to her understudy Polly (Astrid Grarup Elbo, a real dancer at the Royal Ballet), a fragile novice who lacks Darling’s high-voltage diva charisma.
But the doctors disagree, and Darling is abruptly forced into early retirement. After collapsing in agony during rehearsals, she insists the problem can be “trained away”. Meanwhile, Darling is concealing her own medical secret, a worsening hip condition that she masks with powerful painkillers. Complicating tensions further, Kristian is hiding a serious illness, and also shares a sexual history with Darling which still crackles in the air between them, occasionally serving as leverage in their Faustian private deals. Her choreographer husband Frans (Sweden’s Gustaf Skarsgard, son of Stellan and regular on the History Channel drama Vikings) is also working on the production, which outgoing company boss Kristian (Ulrich Thomsen) has lined up as his career-capping swan song. Serbian-born Danish actress Danica Curcic (recently seen on the short-lived Stephen King TV drama The Mist) plays Darling, a haughty prima ballerina returning to Copenhagen from a triumphant spell in New York to star in a flashy new hometown production of Giselle. But its polished mix of lurid melodrama and sexy Nordic eye candy should appeal to genre-friendly festivals and foreign buyers, particularly for small-screen platforms where the Scandi-Noir brand has a loyal niche audience. Backed by Zentropa, the home of Lars von Trier, Staermose’s crisp little chamber thriller is an old-fashioned pot-boiler at heart.
World-premiered at the London Film Festival last month, Darling is currently on theatrical release in Denmark. It certainly has a comparable mood of feverish intensity and a strikingly similar plot, in which two female dancers battle over a juicy stage role while psycho-sexual fireworks explode backstage. Shot on location at the Royal Danish Ballet in Copenhagen, Darling feels like a Nordic remake of Darren Aronofksy’s Black Swan in places. A superstar prima ballerina suffers for her art, and makes damn sure everybody else does, too, in this stylish psycho-thriller from documentarian turned feature director Birgitte Staermose.
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