Her Private Hell: The Perfect Is the Enemy of the Good

Danish filmmaker Nicolas Winding Refn has elevated the authorship of his own films more than any current auteur, save perhaps Quentin Tarantino. Branding the title cards of early movies with his initials, his more recent works feature a distinctive “byNWR” logo. In his latest film, Her Private Hell, the branding shows up on some of the film’s props.

Sophie Thatcher stars as Elle, an actress on location in a futuristic metropolis enshrouded with a sinister mist. Arriving at a giant, empty hotel (we never see any other guests, or staff), she meets her ditzy co-star Hunter (Kristine Froseth). Havana Rose Liu completes the film-within-a-film’s cast as Dominique, Elle’s erstwhile friend who is now…her step-mother. Elle’s dad, a notorious Hollywood player named Johnny Thunders, hangs around for a scene or two to lock in his daughter’s smoldering resentment of his new mate. “Making a movie is like going to war,” he intones, then disappears.

We learn the city’s mist hides a mysterious serial killer known as Leatherman. A phantom with razor-sharp diamond gloves and a supervillain origin story, he originated as a father searching for his lost daughter in the underworld. While the actors work on their goofy sci-fi flick and lounge around the luxurious hotel, an American soldier named Private K (Charles Melton), who may also be Leatherman, prowls the mist, getting in trouble with police and gangsters alike.

“This movie’s going to be hell,” Elle laments, but the film-within-a-film has no director, no camera crew or gaffers working on set. Instead, Refn simply presents Elle and her co-stars clunking around in a low-budget spaceship and wandering a crystal-studded planetoid as a kind of alternate reality to the already synthetic one that is Her Private Hell.

Refn has always shown an appreciation for artifice as an aesthetic conceit, initially as contrast to the urban gutter milieu of his early films Pusher (1996) and Bleeder (1999). Since his box office peak of Drive (2011), Refn has gravitated toward purposefully artificial images, most notably his last big screen outing, The Neon Demon (2016). That film’s incredibly cold, hard shiny look suited its themes of impossible beauty and vampiric longevity.

Unfortunately this approach falls flat in Her Private Hell. Every shot exudes the perfect glossy sheen of a perfume ad, with similar emotional depth. The themes of hostile fathers and lost daughters, enshrouded in the mythic bloodletting of the Leatherman and the carnal exploits of the actress characters, never come to life. The actors do what they can with the material, but are given little opportunity outside of hitting their marks within Refn’s micromanaged hellscape.

Her Private Hell is Refn’s first big screen foray since “[falling] into the streaming abyss,” as he put it in the post-screening Q&A. Following epic length miniseries for Amazon and Netflix, he felt called back to theatrical storytelling, “the collective experience of going to the movie theater.”  He freely cops to approaching Her Private Hell as an alchemy of his previous big-screen work, a purge of sorts before his next artistic evolution. The only way to kill Leatherman is to cut off his hands, a detail reminiscent of his reviled Drive follow-up Only God Forgives (2013). Likewise, a grisly eyeball-gouging references the (much more memorable) ending of The Neon Demon. 

The filmmaker has a compelling reason to get this all out of his system, having suffered momentary death on the operating table during open heart surgery in 2023. (Naturally, he has it all on video.) “I wanted to make an opera,” something he’d never done before, and sought out the old-school maestro Pino Donaggio, composer of classic scores for Brian DePalma and others. It’s not an opera – there is no singing whatsoever – but Donaggio’s soaring, melodramatic score is easily the best thing about Her Private Hell. 

A meta sci-fi/giallo hybrid from the director of Drive sounds sick as hell on paper, which makes the ordeal of sitting through Her Private Hell all the more disappointing. Still, one can respect Refn’s stubborn insistence on creating work crafted at the highest level, for the least possible commercial interest (it’s DOA at the box office). His priority is to create polarized responses and create conversation, something he has been adept at throughout his career. “The whole good and bad world is irrelevant,” he explains. “I make movies. They’re supposed to move you.”

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