“Her Private Hell“? More like our public misery.
If, for David Lynch, ideas are like fish in a river, then for Danish provocateur Nicolas Winding Refn, those ideas are like chunks of excrement in an exploded sewage pipe. His first feature since “The Neon Demon” 10 years ago and after allegedly dying for 25 minutes in 2023, the neon-drowned, anguishingly languid and abstruse “Her Private Hell” feels like you’re dying (and very, very slowly) for a soporific hour and 49 minutes. With ghoulish visuals, a coughed-up script in which Refn appears to pastiche only himself, and performances that even at their best just die onscreen under the portentous weight of the filmmaker’s dreadfully detached vision, it’s one of the most miserable theatrical viewing experiences in years.
Starring Sophie Thatcher, Havana Rose Liu, and Kristine Froseth all delivering lines at .25x speed like they’re trapped in the circuit club version of The Black Lodge, “Her Private Hell” is another motionless tableau from the director who hasn’t made a good film since “Drive.” This one’s so bad that it threatens to mandela-effect you into wondering if that 2011 smash hit that won him Best Director at Cannes and turned Ryan Gosling into an action hero was even good at all.
In an unspecified metropolis that brings to mind some bad-dream version of the “Blade Runner 2049” set, actress Elle (Thatcher) arrives at the gleaming Tower Hotel for a meeting with blond-haired influencer-type Hunter (Froseth). She’s about to direct Elle in a new role in a sci-fi film inspired by a swashbuckling comic series called “Candy Floss,” but as “Her Private Hell” drifts and dreams its way into garish imaginings of what this film looks like, it more resembles the original “Power Rangers” series with a crystal-coated mise-en-scène seemingly designed by a blindfolded art director. All the women are obsessed with an oily, unctuous man named Johnny Thunders (Dougray Scott), who’s now married to Elle’s ex-lover Dominique (Liu). Their dynamic plays out in a barely scripted psychodrama that feels like a narcotized Bergman trying to direct a catfight.
Meanwhile, a mysterious mist is oozing out in the city below, unleashing a serial killer known as The Leather Man, who haunts the streets dressed in top-to-toe, zippered-up leather fetishwear. His modus operandi appears to be inducing women to cry out “daddy!” in his presence almost as often as Ana de Armas did in Andrew Dominik’s equally audience-loathing navel-gaze at female celebrity image, “Blonde.” Then, he smashes in their pretty heads and rips open their ribcages like a chicken carcass. We first see it happen to a woman through the windows of another hotel as Elle and Hunter watch on with dead eyes.
And dead are the eyes just about everywhere, the performances enacted seemingly under a bad spell. Elsewhere, prowling the streets in slow motion is Private Kay (Charles Melton, in surely the least stimulating role of his young but already auspicious career), a blank space with sharp cheekbones and the shape of a person who is looking for his missing daughter and fighting off yakuza-like men and, I believe, a sumo wrestler in what feels like table scraps from Refn’s 2013 misfire “Only God Forgives.” Like that film and “The Neon Demon,” “Her Private Hell” appears to be molding itself into the shape of a Greek tragedy, but there’s nothing Greek about it — just tragic, and deadly onscreen.
Refn has made characters moving and speaking in a benzodiazepine fugue state — lines hissed out stiltedly into dead air, spoken like throwing stones down a well — his signature in recent films. It’s in rare form in “Her Private Hell,” whose dire pacing is slathered upon by composer Pino Donaggio’s endless Bernard Herrmann-slop string score that brings to mind “Vertigo” if Hitchcock directed it from his deathbed. Visually, with cinematography by Magnus Nordenhof Jønck (who shot Refn’s 2022 Netflix series “Copenhagen Cowboy”), “Her Private Hell” is hideous — when you can see the actors on the screen at all, who are either underlit to the point of near-total erasure or victimized by a fog machine.
The cast is poorly served by Nicolas Winding Refn and Esti Giordani’s malnourished screenplay and a muddled story that, I know, is not the point, as Refn is chasing not a full artistic meal but instead the isolated adrenaline hits you get from numbed-out doomscrolling. That turns out to be a terrible approach. The always-present Diego Calva gets basically three lines as an elusive lothario who, while fucking one woman against a plate of glass, appears to cause another woman to be thrown through one, by The Leather Man. These things are happening in tandem, anyway. And that’s all the women here are, dolls for Refn to dress up and play with, though Thatcher seems attuned to the filmmaker’s desultory cadence, i.e., understood the assignment even if it was a shitty one.
Refn knows he’s playing us, and he doesn’t care. Here is a director who gets off on being an enfant terrible even at 55 years old. People will say of “Her Private Hell,” “It’s not for everyone.” Truthfully, it’s not for anyone, except maybe the director’s most perverse and purist devotees. Baffling, bewildering, brilliant, whatever you want to call it, I’ll never see another Nicolas Winding Refn movie again.
Grade: D
“Her Private Hell” premiered at the 2026 Cannes Film Festival. Neon releases the film on July 24.
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