By George & Josh Bate
Nicolas Winding Refn has a reputation for challenging movies. His feature directorial debut Pusher and much of his early efforts aimed to reflect the brutal realities of the world with unflinching compromise, resulting in a number of gritty, bold, and violent movies. As his career evolved, however, Refn increasingly dove into the surreal and abstract. This pivot resulted in his previous two movies – The Neon Demon and Only God Forgives – receiving both boos and standing ovations when they premiered at Cannes Film Festival, reflecting the polarizing nature of his more recent work.
After a 10 year break from feature movies, Refn now returns to the big screen for what is his most inaccessible work to date, a beautifully composed yet aggressively slow and subtextually frustrating delirium of a movie that indeed lives up to its title as a hellish watch.
Her Private Hell takes place in a futuristic metropolis in which a mysterious mist engulfs everything. Elle (Sophie Thatcher) lives in a hotel in the heart of the city as she and her father Johnny Thunders (Dougray Scott) prepare to make a movie together. Suddenly, however, Johnny leaves Elle to make the movie for herself, supposedly in an effort to allow her to repair the relationship with her much younger step-mother and former best friend Dominique (Havana Rose Liu). Elsewhere, an American GI named Private K (Charles Melton) desperately searches for his missing daughter, whom he believes is trapped in the underworld.
The premise describing Refn’s new movie, while accurate in a superficial sense, woefully belies just how bizarre and off-putting it is. From the opening moments, which depict a neon-soaked Blade Runner-esque city, to the final credits, Refn refuses to ground his film in anything resembling reality. Every character without exception utters dialogue no one in the real world would speak, even the most foundational of exposition is nowhere to be found, and two disparate narratives simultaneously feel intimately connected and entirely separated from one another. As a result, Her Private Hell is difficult to approach, never mind begin to comprehend.
The aforementioned disparate narratives emphasize just how unwieldy Refn’s myriad of ideas are. One of these narratives is a quietly seductive melodrama centered around a twisted love triangle of a daughter, father, and step-mother. The other, involving Melton’s pursuit of his missing daughter, leans more into neo-noir horror and action. Both strands of the story are connected by the mist that engulfs the city, a shared exploration of parenthood, and a mysterious slasher figure known as Leatherman, but, otherwise, feel like two different movies squeezed into one.
Coupled with the confusion caused by blurring two movies into one, Refn fails to make either story even remotely compelling. Punishingly slow pacing means scenes last far too long and induce sleep, rather than inquisition. It is clear that Refn is aiming for some kind of commentary on the imperfections of family, with one strand of the story focusing on a caring father rescuing his daughter and the other focusing on a daughter navigating a disturbing, psychosexual relationship with her father, but the filmmaker leaves far too much up for interpretation and makes the egregious misstep of being unintelligible, rather than abstract.
Saving the film from complete ruin is a real craft of filmmaking, which Refn has consistently exhibited throughout his career. Cinematographer Magnus Nordenhof Jønck teams up with Refn to create a visually stunning movie that relies on oppressive, neon lighting, while production designer Gitte Malling establishes a setting for the film that is stark and unwelcoming.
Legendary composer Pino Donaggio, best known for his work with Brian De Palma and Dario Argento, provides a score for the movie that fully embraces the melodrama and more fairy tale qualities of the story. So effective is Donaggio’s score that some scenes, which would otherwise prove thoroughly disengaging, are kept alive and vibrant due to his music alone.
Donaggio’s music goes hand-in-hand with Refn’s homage to slasher classics from De Palma and Argento, although this potentially promising idea remains disappointingly underexplored. Leatherman is an ominous figure who lurks over the entire film and is treated by Refn in a manner similar to how Argento approached giallo villains. Unfortunately, the Leatherman material plays such a minor role in the film that it feels more like a half-hearted, underdeveloped idea thrown into the mix, as opposed to an integrally important piece of the puzzle.
Refn’s direction and the screenplay he co-wrote with Esti Giordani restricts the range of the impressive ensemble he put together. Sophie Thatcher is one of the more talented young actresses working today but is only allowed to take her performance to a different, more striking level in a couple scenes in the third act. Otherwise, she is stoic, devoid of personality, and uncompelling as a protagonist.
All of these descriptors can also be applied to Charles Melton, yet another accomplished actor who suffers under the weight of dull material. Melton certainly looks the part as a ‘50s American GI (weirdly akin to a scene from Riverdale in which he looked similar) and is quite the bad ass as he scours the streets of a seedy metropolis and kicks all kinds of ass. But Melton is provided such little dialogue and tasked with such little emotional expression that, like Thatcher, renders his performance muted and flat.
Havana Rose Liu brings slightly more personality into the proceedings as arguably the film’s most interesting character. Dominique is married to Elle’s father but had a long-standing friendship with Elle that was seemingly shattered upon her marrying Elle’s father. There is an understated sexual chemistry between Thatcher and Liu, keeping the audience on its toes as to whether the two secretly harbor romantic or sexual feelings for one another. Refn squanders the potential of this fascinating dynamic, which in a different, more grounded story could have made for an absorbing watch.
VERDICT: 2/10
At one point in the film, Thatcher says, “This movie’s gonna be hell” when discussing the film her character Elle is making. One can’t help but believe that Refn was telling the audience something with this remark. Her Private Hell may bolster impressive production value and aesthetics but there is little else that redeems the cinematic equivalent of traversing a never-ending underworld.