Cinematic Releases: Her Private Hell (2026) - Reviewed

Images courtesy of NEON

Back in 2011, Danish writer-producer-director Nicolas Winding Refn tapped into the mainstream circuit with his Cannes Film Festival favorite Drive starring Ryan Gosling.  Winner of the Best Director award, it channeled everything from Walter Hill to Michael Mann and even a bit of Michael Winner into its odyssey of a stunt driver operating as a contract getaway professional by night (and sometimes day).  Refn was poised at the very top of the global cinema landscape and garnered a startling new following whose cult power is still felt over ten years later.  Then, following a Tarot Card reading with Chilean-French surrealist Alejandro Jodorowsky, from then on Refn started dealing in increasingly incoherent neon drenched horror whose levels of viciousness only intensified with each project.  With Only God Forgives, audiences went in expecting another Drive pairing with Ryan Gosling and instead got Enter the Void set in Thailand which all but angered and alienated his newly built fanbase.
 
In the years since The Neon Demon, his dreamy and fairy-tale like Los Angeles horror film set within the fashion industry, Refn redirected his attention from the big silver screen to the streaming television omniverse when it was still in its infancy with his Amazon Prime series Too Old to Die Young which might still be his best work 13 hours and all.  The trouble is Amazon reportedly buried the program for being too violent and transgressive with zero consideration for an audience and only the bold and brave surviving his endless opus.  Next came Copenhagen Cowboy, a Netflix program which returned the director to his native homeland of Denmark and reunited him with two of his key Pusher cast members Zlatko Burić and Slavko Labović but also willfully began pushing more and more towards science fiction with metaphysical fairy tale logic including but not limited to aliens, vampires and Hideo Kojima talking about giants.  All the while his audiovisual canvas kept shifting into 4K digital photography with Dolby Atmos sound mixing becoming his new standard with the Pusher trilogy getting a sexy 4K makeover.  His technique keeps becoming more precise as his regard for narrative form continues to deliberately meander.

 
Nowhere is that truer than his first film in ten years Her Private Hell, an indescribable science-fiction odyssey as neo-noir psychedelia full of wild performances that range from Refn’s time honored stoicism to borderline Kabuki theater-like reckless abandon, one foot in Blade Runner with the other in his longtime obsession Flesh for Frankenstein.  Nebulous and a bit like Mario Bava or Antonio Margheriti in a world that’s equal parts Planet of the Vampires and War of the Planets, the film was supposedly loosely inspired by a near death experience involving a heart attack which left the director dead for supposedly 25 minutes.  The resulting finished film with its lavish audiovisual cocktail of neon-pinks, purples, blues and reds smearing together in a lovely miasma of color blindness lensed by Copenhagen Cowboy cinematographer Magnus Nordenhof Jønck in scope 2.35:1 widescreen is again like Only God Forgives before it a kind of silent sound picture.  Precise leitmotifs and execution of fluid camera movement and subtle controlled zooms take precedence over any regard for the usual ingredients used to assemble a movie.

 
In a near-distant megalopolis in Tokyo consisting of monumental skyscrapers which all pierce the clouds like The Empire Strikes Back replete with a tower looking like a pair of angry talons clawing out into the open air, a strange mist begins permeating the city and with it a mysterious entity only known as The Leather Man who begins murdering women.  A giallo stereotype kicked into high gear with diamond covered gloves and a metallic covered jacket and sometimes glowing red The Terminator eyes, he skulks about the concrete and glass canyons ripping women apart from the chest.  All the while, the film follows a young actress named Elle (Sophie Thatcher) in her search for her missing father in tandem with another storyline involving an American G.I. named Private K (Charles Melton) who is searching for his missing daughter.  Whether or not these separate threads are related, there will come a time when Refn will collide them together in ways unexpected and leaving you not fully sure of what you’ve seen or how it sort of ended.

 
With his now trademark tradition of street casting non-actors into central roles, deliberately mannered and stunted dialogue full of elongated pauses, dichotomy between the cutesy pretty and ugly crimson soaked brutality, Refn’s latest picture isn’t a film so much as it is a collection of fixations.  When you watch the making of Copenhagen Cowboy or read about the making of Only God Forgives and The Neon Demon, Refn has a rough skeleton of a script which he almost always tosses out the window as his real ideas come to him on set.  Perhaps the closest pop surrealist we’ve had in terms of uncompromising disregard for viewership or trying to meet in the middle as David Lynch or again his hero Jodorowsky, Refn’s commitment to the purely visual aspect and ecospheric soundscapes punctuated by percussive violent confrontation is such that he doesn’t care if he shoots himself in the foot at the same time.

 
Almost as integral of a character to this omniverse of Cronenbergian robot-like performers save for Sophie Thatcher who goes the full fearless physical emotional distance for Refn’s bizarre vision is legendary Brian De Palma collaborator and creative composer Pino Donaggio’s dreamy giallo-like score.  With high cues and melodramatic lows that will remind listeners of his scores for Carrie and Dressed to Kill, it is a young directorial pairing with a living compositional legend reminiscent of when Quentin Tarantino joined forces with Ennio Morricone on The Hateful Eight.  If nothing else, the film carries the viewer and listener through the otherwise opaque and vague narrative.  Most of the performers in the film are posing as models with emphasis on the feminine versus the masculine form though Sophie Thatcher at times channels the insane fervor of Isabelle Adjani or Faye Dunaway in between looking chilly and cool with increasingly outlandish eye makeup.  Charles Melton also has an intensely physical performance with lots of combat fighting and smashing gangsters through alleyways.  Still, it goes without saying the director himself is the star of this kind of Superman flavored ice creamed cone of a movie.   

 
The question becomes, up against such fare as The Odyssey and Spider Man about to be released, how does the new #byNWR fare in today’s increasingly shifting landscape with do-it-yourself newcomers like Markiplier, Curry Barker and Kane Parsons striking gold over the veterans?  At last night’s largely full screening of dedicated Refn fans with no walkouts, the turnout seemed to suggest audiences are surprisingly game for largely incoherent and formless sensory excess.  As an obsessive Refn follower who has done everything from his still unreleased-in-the-US Bleeder to his ethereal and eerie Prada short Touch of Crude, I thought all of that would prepare me for what is plainly his strangest and most willfully uncommercial work yet.  For good or for ill, I was wrong and though its difficult to recommend this to most people outside of like-minded die-hards, Her Private Hell remains proof positive Nicolas Winding Refn is one of the most striking visual artists of our generation even if the work itself isn’t always to your liking.

--Andrew Kotwicki