‘Her Private Hell’ Review: Sexy, Strange, Soporific
Nicolas Winding Refn returns to the big screen with much of what he’s known for. The film is both better and worse for it.
After a tumultuous outing at May’s Cannes Film Festival, where director Nicolas Winding Refn and his cast received the standard fare standing ovation and less than stellar reviews, Refn’s first feature since 2016’s The Neon Demon opened in the U.S. on July 24th.
While it’s been a decade in the making, Refn hasn’t been totally off the radar. The Danish auteur most recently directed 2019’s Too Old To Die Young and 2023’s Copenhagen Cowboy, both limited series that fit right in with the atmosphere of his films.
After his 25 minute scrape with death three years ago, and a new outlook on life along with some new perspective, Refn teams up with NEON and returns to the big screen this week with a bigger budget and a cast full of new Hollywood darlings in Her Private Hell.
The film opens up in a Blade Runner-esque landscape as Elle, played by Yellowjackets’ Sophie Thatcher emerges from a suffocating neon mist that makes you feel immediately at home in Refn’s trademark fever-dream darkness. There’s a couple of plotlines at work here, including Thatcher’s Elle and her dream-girl dressed entourage, filled out by Havana Rose Liu (Bottoms) and Kristine Froseth (The Buccaneers), taking refuge in her penthouse as the sinister yet mysterious Leather Man terrorizes the city below.
On the other side is May December’s Charles Melton. He plays Refn’s trademark intoxicating leather-clothed male figure, the American soldier Private K who walks himself into the center of Leather Man’s rampage. Setting out on a rampage of his own, Melton sinks himself into the city’s underworld – a post-war definitely-not-Japan hell-noir – on the hunt for Leather Man in the search for his missing daughter.
The performances work well enough within the world Refn’s script is asking of them, but the script is so wholly ridiculous and dull that many of the performances come off as jarring and aren’t particularly memorable. Kristine Froseth really goes for it as Hunter and is probably the standout if there is one to be had, though even she feels underutilized in a film that was begging for someone to take control of a scene. Melton’s Private K is generally the more compelling thread of the runtime and there’s a world where it could have worked as a film itself barring the climax. Thatcher gives a serviceable performance as Elle, but whenever she is given anything to do other than brooding or waxing about her father, her scenes almost always result in the film’s more confounding choices and it is lesser for it.
The major plots do result in a climax of a sort though rather tediously and the film never goes to the trouble of caring that much about finding any sort of a compelling resolution for much of what it’s trying to say when it’s trying to say anything at all. Some might refer to the ultrasurrealist, dreamy nature of the film as Lynchian. Therein lies the problem. Her Private Hell comes across as trying to be ultrasurreal and dreamy, almost in a meta sense and instead comes across as absurd and not a little ridiculous.
Refn operates here with major contrasts. He weaves between elegance and grit and swaps between sex and violence, but none of it feels new. It doesn’t register as Refn phoning it in, but rather not seeing a need to step outside his comfort zone to create anything new.
If the viewer sticks it out through the 1hr 50min runtime, they’ll recognize Her Private Hell as fundamentally a montage of everything Refn’s formula has to offer, almost dogmatic at this point in his approach to filmmaking.
One might expect that to appeal to Refn’s hardliners. I can’t speak for them. But even for those who enjoy Refn’s previous outings, too much of the same might be the only real strength here – where flashes of something more interesting breaks through. He isn’t firing on all cylinders. If he were, if the execution were there, perhaps the commitment to what he knows best wouldn’t be the confounding miss that this is.
One major – probably the singular – departure from Refn’s greatest hits is the soundtrack. For much of the film the synth-centric tracks that went hand in hand with earlier Refn outings are sidelined here. Instead, he opts for a loftier orchestral score headed up by longtime Brian De Palma collaborator Pino Donaggio. The synth isn’t entirely absent, revving up momentarily in the film’s homestretch.
It looks good, though, not that that was ever in doubt. It just isn’t enough in the end. Bogged down by Refn’s reliance on style and hoping it would result in substance, Her Private Hell isn’t quite a mess worth trying to untangle.
Her Private Hell stars Sophie Thatcher and Charles Melton opens in the United States on June 24th. The film was directed by Nicolas Winding Refn.
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