We're swept away with her on a wash of minimal synth music and trauma.
As we watch (and listen), we are swept away on a tide of changing social attitudes to race, gender and sexuality, the singularity of love splintered into kaleidoscopic reflections of desire and devotion.
Portman is superb as the brittle ballerina facing up to her nightmares when she lands her dream role, and between the punishing routines, her monstrous mother (Barbara Hershey) and the fever of performance, we're swept away.
We are taken to the disused whaling station at Grytviken, where huge tanks and boilers lie rusting in the snow, but after only a few paragraphs we're swept away by digressions into Elgar, then to meet a first world war veteran who fought at Passchendaele, then to Marinetti and futurism, Nazi industrialisation, and so on, before being allowed back to the Antarctic.
The trope of the awed child our surrogate explorer is science fiction's way of letting us know that the story is entering another world; moments later, we are swept away to the stunning Wakanda, a fictional black kingdom on the African continent.
Working with cinematographer Dion Beebe, editor James Herbert and visual effects supervisor Nick Davis, Liman is so adroit at layering in action and tension that we are swept away by his brisk cinematic tide even when we lose track of where it's taking us.
And while we're not dismissing these apocalyptic warnings, let's give a little before-the-fact thought not just to the protection of the nation's resources, information systems, and infrastructure, but to what's likely to happen to rights, liberties, and the rule of law once we're swept away by cyber fears.
We learned later that about 200 of the guests who had been staying where we would have been were swept away.
Buildings were swept away, we're in a mountainous area - it's a mess.
