{"id":679878,"date":"2026-05-19T15:29:10","date_gmt":"2026-05-19T15:29:10","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/679878\/"},"modified":"2026-05-19T15:29:10","modified_gmt":"2026-05-19T15:29:10","slug":"her-private-hell-review-nicolas-winding-refns-ghastly-thriller","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/679878\/","title":{"rendered":"‘Her Private Hell’ Review: Nicolas Winding Refn’s Ghastly Thriller"},"content":{"rendered":"

\u201cHer Private Hell<\/a>\u201c? More like our public misery. <\/p>\n

If, for David Lynch, ideas are like fish in a river, then for Danish provocateur Nicolas Winding Refn<\/a>, those ideas are like chunks of excrement in an exploded sewage pipe. His first feature since \u201cThe Neon Demon\u201d 10 years ago and after allegedly dying for 25 minutes in 2023, the neon-drowned, anguishingly languid and abstruse \u201cHer Private Hell<\/a>\u201d feels like you\u2019re 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\u2019s dreadfully detached vision, it\u2019s one of the most miserable theatrical viewing experiences in years.<\/p>\n

\"Ben'Imana\"<\/a> \"Miles<\/a> <\/p>\n

Starring Sophie Thatcher, Havana Rose Liu, and Kristine Froseth all delivering lines at .25x speed like they\u2019re trapped in the circuit club version of The Black Lodge, \u201cHer Private Hell\u201d is another motionless tableau from the director who hasn\u2019t made a good film<\/a> since \u201cDrive.\u201d This one\u2019s so bad that it threatens to mandela-effect you into wondering if that 2011 smash hit that won him Best Director at Cannes<\/a> and turned Ryan Gosling into an action hero was even good at all.<\/p>\n

In an unspecified metropolis that brings to mind some bad-dream version of the \u201cBlade Runner 2049\u201d set, actress Elle (Thatcher) arrives at the gleaming Tower Hotel for a meeting with blond-haired influencer-type Hunter (Froseth). She\u2019s about to direct Elle in a new role in a sci-fi film inspired by a swashbuckling comic series called \u201cCandy Floss,\u201d but as \u201cHer Private Hell\u201d drifts and dreams its way into garish imaginings of what this film looks like, it more resembles the original \u201cPower Rangers\u201d series with a crystal-coated mise-en-sc\u00e8ne seemingly designed by a blindfolded art director. All the women are obsessed with an oily, unctuous man named Johnny Thunders (Dougray Scott), who\u2019s now married to Elle\u2019s ex-lover Dominique (Liu). Their dynamic plays out in a barely scripted psychodrama that feels like a narcotized Bergman trying to direct a catfight.<\/p>\n

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 is inducing women to cry out \u201cdaddy!\u201d in his presence almost as often as Ana de Armas did in Andrew Dominik\u2019s equally audience-loathing, similarly navel-gazing look at female celebrity image, \u201cBlonde.\u201d 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.<\/p>\n

\"'Her\u2018Her Private Hell\u2019Neon<\/p>\n

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<\/a>, 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 are surely table scraps from Refn\u2019s 2013 misfire \u201cOnly God Forgives.\u201d Like that film and \u201cThe Neon Demon,\u201d \u201cHer Private Hell\u201d works itself into the shape of a Greek tragedy, but there\u2019s nothing Greek about it \u2014 just tragic, and deadly onscreen.<\/p>\n

Refn has made characters moving and speaking in a benzodiazepine fugue state \u2014 lines hissed out stiltedly into dead air, spoken like throwing stones down a well \u2014 his signature in recent films. It\u2019s in rare form in \u201cHer Private Hell,\u201d whose dire pacing is slathered upon by composer Pino Donaggio\u2019s endless Bernard Herrmann-slop string score that brings to mind \u201cVertigo\u201d if Hitchcock directed it from his deathbed. Visually, with cinematography by Magnus Nordenhof J\u00f8nck (who shot Refn\u2019s 2022 Netflix series \u201cCopenhagen Cowboy\u201d), \u201cHer Private Hell\u201d is hideous \u2014 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.<\/p>\n

The cast is poorly served by Nicolas Winding Refn<\/a> and Esti Giordani\u2019s 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\u2019s all the women here are, dolls for Refn to dress up and play with, though Thatcher seems attuned to the filmmaker\u2019s desultory cadence, i.e., understood the assignment even if it was a shitty one.<\/p>\n

Refn knows he\u2019s playing us, and he doesn\u2019t care. Here is a director who gets off on being an enfant terrible even at 55 years old. People will say of \u201cHer Private Hell,\u201d \u201cIt\u2019s not for everyone.\u201d Truthfully, it\u2019s not for anyone, except maybe the director\u2019s most perverse and purist devotees. Baffling, bewildering, brilliant, whatever you want to call it, I\u2019ll never see another Nicolas Winding Refn movie again.<\/p>\n

Grade: D<\/p>\n

\u201cHer Private Hell\u201d premiered at the 2026 Cannes Film Festival. Neon releases the film on July 24.<\/p>\n

Want to stay up to date on IndieWire\u2019s film\u00a0reviews<\/a>\u00a0and critical thoughts?\u00a0Subscribe here<\/a>\u00a0to our newsletter In Review by David Ehrlich, in which our Chief Film Critic and Head Reviews Editor rounds up the best new reviews and streaming picks along with some exclusive musings \u2014\u00a0all only available to subscribers.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"\u201cHer Private Hell\u201c? More like our public misery. If, for David Lynch, ideas are like fish in a…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":679879,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[8],"tags":[49,48,43877,75,28908,1554,249282,249283,209],"class_list":["post-679878","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-entertainment","tag-ca","tag-canada","tag-cannes","tag-entertainment","tag-festivals","tag-film","tag-her-private-hell","tag-nicolas-winding-refn","tag-reviews"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/679878","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=679878"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/679878\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/679879"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=679878"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=679878"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=679878"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}