‘Her Private Hell’ Review: Sophie Thatcher and Charles Melton in Danish Bad Boy Nicolas Winding Refn’s Agonizingly Self-Indulgent Return to Filmmaking

Sometime after Drive, probably between Only God Forgives and The Neon Demon, Nicolas Winding Refn decided to make movies, plus a few TV series, for the unique viewing pleasure of Nicolas Winding Refn.

This is great news if you happen to be Nicolas Winding Refn, who now directs under the production banner byNWR — proof as ever that he’s turned into his own brand. It’s also great news if you’re one of his diehard fans, reveling in works that have become increasingly mannered and self-indulgent: exquisitely crafted B-movies for the highly select few.

But if you’re none of the above, watching a new Refn work can be a grueling experience, making one long for the pre-NWR days when the Danish auteur delivered tightly wound, visually dazzling and punishingly violent genre flicks like the Pusher trilogy, Bronson, Valhalla Rising and of course, Drive.

After a major health scare that nearly cost him his life, the director returns to feature filmmaking following a ten-year absence with Her Private Hell, which premiered as a midnight screening in Cannes. The fact that the film didn’t play competition like Refn’s last three movies gives you a hint of how excessively numbing his latest work is, though you’d have to try and sit through it to see for yourself. To his credit, NWR does give us a warning early on when he has one of his characters only half-ironically claim: “This movie’s gonna be hell.” But that doesn’t make watching Her Private Hell any less hellish.

Set in a fog-filled, computer-generated futuristic netherworld that looks like the backdrop for a music video that aired on MTV back in the late ’80s, the film can best be described as a horror-thriller, though it’s more of a celebration of that genre through Refn’s refined and opulent aesthetic, which leaves no fetishy stone unturned.

The story is easy to follow if you don’t care much for logic. A famous actress, Elle (Sophie Thatcher), is holed up at a towering 5-star hotel while waiting to shoot her latest film, which is called Candy Floss and looks like a new entry to the Star Wars franchise directed by NWR. Deliberately schlocky and over-the-top, the production is a mere backdrop for the psychodrama happening off set between Elle and her costar Dominique (Havana Rose Liu), a girl her own age who’s also unfortunately her stepmother.

Married to the star’s movie mogul father, Johnny Thunders (Dougray Scott) — no relation, apparently, to the late New York Dolls guitarist of the same name — Dominique shows up at the hotel and brings Elle’s daddy issues bubbling to the surface, forcing her to confront the many (neon) demons in her life. There’s also an actual demon called the Leather Man, who’s some kind of mythical horror creature preying on lost young daughters, whom he rips apart with his elegant suede-and-rhinestone gloves.

But wait, now we’ve been whisked away to postwar Japan, where a GI named Kay (Charles Melton) roams the streets of Tokyo looking to take on the Leather Man with his bare fists, hoping to rescue his own daughter from oblivion. Who knows how or why we got here, but at least the setting gives Refn an excuse to dish out one gloriously gruesome fight scene between Kay and an extra-large yakuza.  

This happens around midway through Her Private Hell, though it’s possible all the non-NWR acolytes will have checked out by then. Both extravagant and extravagantly dull, the film often feels like it’s playing in slow-motion, with the cast laboring to deliver lines (“I am the victim of mist,” “I am made of stardust”) that make little sense to us or them. Melton — whom Refn shoots topless or else decked out in military or biker gear — actually looks like he’s blanking out during one ponderous monologue his character listens to, while Thatcher and Liu do their best to stay engaging as their heroines duke it out.

There are a few good stabs at humor early on and it’s only too bad Refn didn’t give us some more jokes, because nothing on screen should be taken too seriously. What the director does seem serious as hell about is paying homage to all the slasher movies he loves, whether Italian giallo flicks by Dario Argento and Lucio Fulci or the works of Brian De Palma, whose longtime composer Pino Donaggio provides the film’s operatic synth score.

For fans of those cultish works, which had their heyday around the time Refn was growing up and discovering them for himself, Her Private Hell plays like a nostalgic jewel box that literally looks like it was shot inside of a jewel box. The film is stylized to the point of abstraction; the production budget in glitter, tinfoil, transparent plastics, strobes, smoke machines and red or blue lighting gels must have exceeded everything else. Cinematographer Magnus Nordenhof Jonck (who shot Refn’s series Copenhagen Cowboy) creates some mesmerizing images out of all that gear, but so many that they can feel blinding, while production designer Gitte Malling’s lush sets are a succession of red rooms for cinephiles.

With all that effort put into making something so lavish, it’s too bad the movie fails to sustain our attention — and actively seems to combat it at times. When Refn came onto the scene in the early aughts, his work was anything but boring. It felt bold and fresh, making the director an early ringleader of the “elevated genre” trend that brought B-movies into the arthouse. Drive’s sensational premiere at Cannes in 2011 was a consecration of his cinema, but perhaps also the tipping point. Since then, NWR has headed further and further down the rabbit hole of his own obsessions, with his latest bringing him all the way to some level of hell. If his film’s fetishized heroine manages to claw her way back out by the end, conquering her daddy issues and taking on the boogeyman, most of us are still stuck down there.