{"id":436292,"date":"2026-05-20T07:03:12","date_gmt":"2026-05-20T07:03:12","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/436292\/"},"modified":"2026-05-20T07:03:12","modified_gmt":"2026-05-20T07:03:12","slug":"her-private-hell-review-nicolas-winding-refn-gets-lost-in-movie-hell","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/436292\/","title":{"rendered":"Her Private Hell Review: Nicolas Winding Refn Gets Lost in Movie Hell"},"content":{"rendered":"

\n\tThe first time I saw Nicolas Winding Refn<\/a> flash the sign of the horns on the red carpet (it was sometime in the 2010s), I thought it was cool. It was the last gesture you expected from a prestige filmmaker. But then Refn not only had a distinctive aesthetic but, it would seem, a rather outr\u00e9 set of values. On the surface, he looked so civilized and Danish, but on the big screen he\u2019d become a punk transgressor who flouted narrative conventions, not to mention the rules of good taste. By the time he brought the loopy slasher revenge opera \u201cOnly God Forgives\u201d to Cannes in 2013 (I was there at the premiere showing where it was roundly booed), the fact that he\u2019d made a movie this purple and garish and brazenly solemn in its pop vulgarity became part of his mystique. He dressed nicely, but he had shot past respectability, or even the desire for it. Maybe the devil made him do it.<\/p>\n

\n\tThen I started to notice something. At every photo op, Refn would flash the sigh of the horns \u2014 and each time he did it, it was less cool. Your allegiance to the devil wasn\u2019t supposed to be a brand. But Refn\u2019s performative mischievousness (he also liked to pose in a boxer\u2019s stance) was all of a piece with his films. He was turning into the movie-director version of a punk showoff. \u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0<\/p>\n

\n\tTo me, the grand folly of Refn\u2019s career<\/a> is that he became this maker of luridly pretentious art-trash curiosities, but before all that got rolling, when he was willing to be a teller of conventional tales, he was actually a fantastic filmmaker. \u201cDrive\u201d looks better than ever \u2014\u00a0a classic urban Western thriller with synth-pop stylings. And I think Refn\u2019s greatest achievement apart from \u201cDrive\u201d is the \u201cPusher\u201d trilogy. If you\u2019ve never seen those three amazing early Refn films, do.<\/p>\n

\n\tI had hopes pinned on \u201cHer Private Hell<\/a>,\u201d Refn\u2019s first movie since \u201cThe Neon Demon,\u201d which premiered at Cannes a decade ago. That film generated some moody power before collapsing into a pile of surrealist-horror shards. But \u201cHer Private Hell\u201d just starts where \u201cThe Neon Demon\u201d left off \u2014 or maybe I should say where \u201cTwin Peaks: The Return\u201d left off, since the new movie plays like a knockoff of David Lynch at his most bafflingly obscure crossed with the hellscape fetishism of Gaspar No\u00e9 crossed with the world\u2019s most avant-garde perfume commercial (which makes sense, since directing avant-garde perfume commercials is now part of how Refn earns his living).<\/p>\n

\n\tThe film has no story. It has lavish sets (the two main ones: a hotel with gold-gilded drape walls and a barren-looking hell). It has a collection of actresses in bejeweled eye make-up who pose and snarl. And it has a gorgeous and absurdly old-fashioned romantic symphonic score, composed by the great Pino Donaggio (who\u2019s like Bernard Herrmann meets Rachmaninoff), that plays under every inch of the movie. That might sound like a bit much (and is), but when you watch \u201cHer Private Hell\u201d you\u2019re grateful to have that music to hang onto. Without it, the film would be even more hellish.<\/p>\n

\n\tWhat, exactly, is Refn up to in this movie that\u2019s not really a movie? He creates an abstract situation (in his mind it\u2019s a \u201cmythology\u201d), where Elle, portrayed by Sophie Thatcher, who suggests the young Juliette Lewis playing a member of the Runaways in Tura Satana\u2019s eye shadow, is trying to reconnect with her father, a rotter named Johnny Thunders (Dougray Scott) who\u2019s like one of Lynch\u2019s ironic middle-aged greasers. Elle has arrived at the Tower Hotel, which pokes up into the clouds, and that\u2019s where she meets Hunter (Kristine Froseth), a sexy brat of an influencer who\u2019s supposed to make a movie with her. Hunter might be called a nice bitch, whereas Dominique (Havana Rose Liu), who is Elle\u2019s stepmother, is more of a dominatrix bitch. But the upshot is that all three actresses are shot like models, so the fact that they\u2019re \u201cplaying characters\u201d never totally takes hold.<\/p>\n

\n\tAfter a while, the film cuts to hell, which is like the Asian underworld landscape of \u201cOnly God Forgives,\u201d only with minimal sets. Charles Melton plays an American GI named Private K who\u2019s trying to locate his daughter and keeps getting into bloody altercations. The fusion of violence and rapture comes from Kenneth Anger, filtered through Lynch, reduced by Refn to fashionista \u201csubversion.\u201d Refn also recycles motifs from his other films, like a torn-out eyeball and the chopping off of hands. And there\u2019s a Lynchian monster \u2014 he\u2019s known as the Leather Man and looks like a sadomasochistic fetish figure. The Leather Man wants a woman to say \u201cDaddy!\u201d just before he rips her chest open and tosses her body out a plate-glass window.<\/p>\n

\n\tIt\u2019s obvious that all of this coheres in Refn\u2019s mind, because he wouldn\u2019t have made it otherwise. But he has become seriously deluded about what an audience wants. \u201cHer Private Hell\u201d is a disaster, but even that\u2019s part of its hipster factor. The film practically announces that it\u2019s too cool to be coherent. Speaking at Cannes, Refn talked about a near-death experience he had in a hospital where he claims to have been dead for 25 minutes before he was revived. It\u2019s good news that he survived, but as a filmmaker he has yet to return to the land of the living.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"The first time I saw Nicolas Winding Refn flash the sign of the horns on the red carpet…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":436293,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[27],"tags":[156,221971,409,111,139,221972,69],"class_list":["post-436292","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-movies","tag-entertainment","tag-her-private-hell","tag-movies","tag-new-zealand","tag-newzealand","tag-nicolas-winding-refn","tag-nz"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/436292","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=436292"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/436292\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/436293"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=436292"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=436292"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=436292"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}