Her Private Hell, almost certainly a lock for the strangest film released in theaters this year, is two hours of Nicolas Winding Refn trying to understand the term “daddy” within his highly idiosyncratic worldview.
Let’s get the obvious out of the way. Look: if you’re a normal, well-adjusted person who likes your entertainment plot-driven and based in a recognizable reality, you will almost certainly hate this movie. There is a lot of overacting, the plot is sparser than any movie released in the last decade, and the dialogue is horrific and excruciatingly slow. It’s all true. The critics are right.
Still here? Spend any time listening to Nic Refn talk, and it’s clear he’s someone interested in the perverse. The Pusher films followed angry, uncompromising drug dealers, while Valhalla Rising told the ultra-savage story of a mute Nordic warrior. Films like Only God Forgives and Drive are about delusional, violent, sexually frozen men, while The Neon Demon compares the cult of beauty to literal vampires. The latter is feminist in both form and theme, and yet it has sequences of slow-motion necrophilia set to synthesizers; Drive is a tender, sensitive love story that later has the princess traumatized by her knight in shining armor stomping someone’s head into bloody pulp. This depravity is always immaculately stylized by Mr. Refn, shot and framed to achieve the most cool points imaginable and designed not to titillate, exactly, but to shock and awe in a way that isn’t easily distinguishable. I enjoy his entire filmography (almost entirely due to Refn’s appreciation for the surreal and dreamlike), but I admit it’s hard to do so without feeling guilty on account of all the edge.
Her Private Hell is not, contrary to what you may hear, Refn’s furthest descent into deviance—that would still be Too Old to Die Young, referenced here in a scene where Melton’s Private K is whipped by his own police chief. But it gets awfully close. The film fetishizes and exaggerates practically everything, from women to men to leather to violence to stepmoms to America to Japan to cyberpunk to grief to dogs to dog collars. Thatcher’s Elle is a blossoming actress starring in a cutesy, campy Star Trek riff called “Candy Floss,” her “private hell” courtesy of being stuck competing with her own stepmom for her father’s attention. K is a Rorschach-monologuing, bone-shredded greaser trying to avenge his little girl by mowing down dozens of Yakuza in his quest for the “Leather Man,” a mythical serial killer wearing diamonds on his gloves who rips young women apart at the sternum like that line in that Purity Ring song. Naturally, it all takes place in an expressionist, Blade Runner-y cityscape drenched in swaths of thick fog and TV Girl neon on every block.
I’m less compelled to defend Refn this time around concerning the usual accusations of misogyny, having no talent, etc—not because I agree with those claims (despite my shared aversion to so much sex and violence, filmgoers en masse seem to forget exploitation cinema is a thing whenever they watch a Refn flick), but because this film, no matter how you slice it, is both trashy and campy but also an abstract experiment, that deadly combo that seems to piss off moviegoers like nothing else. It’s also indulgent, intentionally so, far more than any Refn joint prior. No matter how generously you interpret his obsessions and fixations, the crudeness of the dialogue and the utter lack of subtlety in his neurodivergent sensibilities are not flattering (see the scene where the female triumvirate start barking at each other). It simply makes sense that a movie like this will be hated.
Still, there’s obviously a point to it all, and a certain joy that comes from a film fully embodying such an insane vision of the human experience. On the B plot’s end, the fights are stupendous, a first for Refn after three decades of serviceable action scenes that are usually far less showy. There’s also a deadpan sense of humor here that is incredibly dry—a plus for me, a minus for seemingly everyone else. When Private K is introduced, he is stoically, stiffly eating a bowl of cereal in both full uniform and a room bluer than his personality (he’s described by one character as “the saddest man in the world”). My theater’s reaction to moments like these was so quiet that you could hear the projector hum.
While fairy-tale death dreams don’t have a litany of fans either, Elle’s section is similarly singular: an operatic, soapy Giallo, but also one with an accomplished and deeply mournful sense of melancholy. This movie is clearly the work of a parent, a man worried his obsessions have unintentionally made the world a worse and more complicated place for his children (notice how K and the Leather Man both have the same goal, except one is insane and evil just ‘cuz).
Elle’s acquaintance, Hunter, speaks of the Leather Man like an infatuation with a boy, aroused by potentially being ripped in half. Meanwhile, Elle replicates the callousness of her father, predatory blowhard Johnny Thunders (no, really), both in her treatment of others and in her treatment of herself. To Refn, hell is a world where women surrender to the wiles of evil, powerful men; the Leather Man’s accompanying mist, doubling for the “moral ambiguity” Hunter so longingly speaks of, swallows up innocence in a fog of sadomasochism. If Too Old to Die Young was not-so-subtly taking jabs at America by way of Miles Teller’s pedophilic cop, Her Private Hell reckons with the fact that those men play a pivotal role in the development of young girls. Though K appears in the story at a moment where Elle is calling for “daddy” in her sleep, like some sort of noble superhero summoned by the protagonist herself, he alone cannot save her. The Leather Man’s congruent demise and emasculation via losing his hands returns from Only God Forgives—but not from K, who’s soundly defeated. Through Elle and the ax gifted from her dad.
None of this makes Her Private Hell any less bizarre, or off-putting, or unlikely to be characterized as misogynistic. But for me, the layers upon layers of perversity are undone with a single, beautiful shot at the very end: one of Private K’s little girl, a picture of innocence that immediately turns Her Private Hell into a lament for a world where familiar bonds are corrupted by sin, for a career spent capturing souls adrift in vice and violence. Sincere is not how I’d usually describe Refn’s work, but his reverence for fatherhood is very apparent in this touching reunion. I doubt he’ll ever be able to top this ending, brain-meltingly simple though it may be, because the realization that Refn hates his own shtick, too, can only land with such dizzying surprise—and unexpected warmth—once. 7-24-26
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