Her Private Hell: Nicolas Winding Refn’s gory neon fairytale puts style before substance
The Danish director returns to feature filmmaking with more violent eye-gouging, ambiguous irony and neon-fetishising cinematography in a story of a fantastical metropolis that suffers from wafer-thin characterisation.
- Reviewed from the 2026 Cannes Film Festival
Her Private Hell sees Nicolas Winding Refn return to feature filmmaking after a decade-long absence. To some, even if not very many, the two series he directed in the interim – Too Old to Die Young (2019) and Copenhagen Cowboy (2022), for Amazon and Netflix, respectively – represented a welcome resurgence after the alienating turn he took post-Drive (2011), likely the closest he’ll ever come to a crowd-pleaser. Paradoxically, the series are tantalising not because Refn abandoned this new trajectory but instead doubled down on it, taking the arch pretentiousness and solipsism of Only God Forgives (2013) and The Neon Demon (2016) to baffling, visionary extremes. The format proved liberating and there is a real thrill to watching Refn wreak havoc on its conventions, essentially setting the streamers’ money on fire – to little surprise, neither series was renewed for a second season.
Though Her Private Hell’s feature running time (109 minutes) appears to curb his radical tendencies, getting him to adhere to a more traditional dramatic arc (relatively speaking), the film does offer equivalent pleasures. Making impressive strides in his abiding mission to achieve a style unalloyed by substance, Refn departs from the real world altogether. In a fantastical, set-built metropolis, whose skyscrapers jut out prettily from a permanent blanket of mist, an actress named Elle (Sophie Thatcher) is beset by jealousy after Dominique (Havana Rose Liu), her former best friend and maybe lover, marries her father, Johnny Thunders (Dougray Scott).
Meanwhile, the Leather Man, a mythical gimp-suited killer who traverses centuries in search of his lost daughter, goes around ripping women’s chest cavities open with his diamond-studded gloves. Lest the audience miss the hardly subliminal issues at stake here, the victims all scream “Daddy!” just before being slain. Another plot line, set in Japan, follows the American soldier Private K (Charles Melton) as he attempts to rescue his daughter, whom he believes to have been trapped in hell by the Leather Man. His quest runs him afoul of the Yakuza, for some reason, and he takes out a small army of them in a series of gorgeously choreographed, exceptionally violent martial arts set pieces.
The Private K chapters of the film are the more satisfying, partly because the action keeps things lively, whereas much of Elle’s story is taken up by narcotised dialogue scenes that revolve around her Oedipal predicament, with the characters posing in impeccable, symmetrical compositions. Melton is also by far the most talented actor here, capable of assuming his role with conviction despite the wafer-thin characterisation while the camera takes equal pleasure observing lurid lighting reflect off the folds of his starched uniform and the manifold ridges of his chiselled upper body.
In the most significant departure for Refn, the neon-fetishising cinematography, this time courtesy of Magnus Nordenhof Jønck, is no longer paired with Cliff Martinez’s ambient electro. Instead, an orchestral score plays almost without pause, guiding rather than accompanying the story as it moves from soaring kitsch during the early scenes to thunderingly operatic in the finale. The original soundtrack is by Pino Donaggio, the veteran composer of Nicolas Roeg’s Don’t Look Now (1973), as well as numerous films by Brian De Palma and Dario Argento. The latter auteur’s influence extends beyond this collaboration. In conceiving a haunted, closed-off world drenched in saturated colours and governed by an insular logic indebted solely to atmosphere – or vibe, to use more apropos lingo – Her Private Hell recalls such Argento masterworks as Suspiria (1977) and Inferno (1980).
Buckets of gore and perforated eyeballs notwithstanding, with its minimalist narrative and cast of archetypes, Her Private Hell is Refn’s version of a fairytale, something that he signals at the outset by namechecking his compatriot Hans Christian Andersen. (And, to really drive the point home, having Dominique later tell Elle that she’s her “evil stepmother”.) Elle’s reference to the author of The Little Match Girl prompts her Instagram-addled and soon dispatched fellow actress Hunter (Kristine Froseth) to say she doesn’t listen to European music. The film is filled with such asinine one-liners, delivered with the same solemnity that undergirds Refn’s aesthetic and imbues his excesses – and excessive silliness – with an ambiguous irony. This quality unites all of the director’s work at least since he started dubbing himself NWR in the wake of Drive’s success. To those willing to indulge him, it is integral to its appeal, even as it turns off everyone else.