****/****
starring Sophie Thatcher, Charles Melton, Havana Rose Liu, Dougray Scott
written by Nicolas Winding Refn and Esti Giordani
directed by Nicolas Winding Refn
by Walter Chaw Fantasia 2026 opens with another gauzy, roiling, Tsai Ming-liang via Mario Bava psychosexual dreamscape from Nicolas Winding Refn. Her Private Hell, Refn’s first feature since 2016’s The Neon Demon, plays in the same sandbox: It’s easy to imagine the gamine, fledgling model played by a blonde Elle Fanning in that film evolving into Her Private Hell‘s brunette “Elle” (Sophie Thatcher), a filmmaker burning through a variety of gaudy facial accessories that hide the essential emptiness of her expression. Her Private Hell is no less stunned, soporific–a feature-length version of the rhapsodic shower sequences from Brian De Palma’s Carrie and Dressed to Kill. Given that composer Pino Donaggio has been recruited to provide the film with a swooning score dripping with harp arpeggios and syrupy strings, I suspect the comparison to De Palma’s oeuvre is more artifact than accident.
Joining Peter Strickland’s Berberian Sound Studio, Panos Cosmatos’s Beyond the Black Rainbow, and Bruno Forzani and Hélène Cattet’s Let the Corpses Tan and Reflection in a Dead Diamond in minting the trance sub-genre of horror, Her Private Hell is destined to be a film maudit. It doesn’t care if you don’t like it. Post-Drive, Refn’s genre pictures are designed to confound, to lull, to insinuate–to burrow slowly but insistently into the grey like an earwig looking to nest. You might waste time waiting for Her Private Hell to make literal sense. My second time through, I gave myself over to it, and the experience was different. Which is not to say there isn’t any connective tissue to unpack. Charles Melton’s Kafka-coded American in Tokyo Private K, Dougray Scott’s monstrous movie producer/dad Johnny Thunders (also the name of the New York Dolls‘ lead singer), and a mysterious, possibly incestuous, gimp-clad serial butcher called Leather Man, who has a thing for his nubile victims calling him “daddy” before smashing their heads into and through windows, are all libido projections Elle’s anxiety makes manifest. They’re sadomasochistic fantasies of male sexuality that build a fetishistic bridge back to The Neon Demon, skewering the movie business this time instead of the world of high fashion. Sex as violence? It’s true with ducks and pirate bugs, and Refn suggests it’s true with men in the “industry,” too. The name of Refn’s game is power and submission–the forms both assume and the amount of each required for women to merely exist in these spaces. Hell is other people. More specifically, Hell is to be looked at by other people.
There’s a hint of this in the first ten minutes of Her Private Hell when starlet Hunter (Kristine Froseth) shows up at the tech-noir hotel suite of film director Elle in Canadian evening wear (denim midriff-baring halter and jeans), looking for a place to stay. “I don’t think I can post these,” she says, referring to selfies she’s taken in the luxe environment. “People will think I’m…unrelatable.” Froseth, especially as lit and shot by Refn and DP Magnus Nordenhof Jønck, is one of the most beautiful people on the planet. The idea she’s ever even remotely “relatable” is hilarious, and accounts for the first belly laugh in a deceptively deadpan exercise. I have vacillated over the years between believing that Refn’s arrogant, enfant terrible act is either a put-on or a confession, and have landed on the view that he is more John Waters than Morrissey. If you oscillate at his peculiar frequency, he’s hysterically funny. His sense of humour tends towards the blackest of black ironies and the broadest of provocations. I have thought in the past that he is self-loathing, like his countryman Lars von Trier, but I have come to understand that he finds self-loathing funny. The punchline to Hunter’s worry that she’ll alienate her social-media followers with the characteristics of the solipsistic hedonism that has no doubt attracted them to her in the first place is Elle quietly closing the bathroom door to shut out Hunter’s vacuous stream of consciousness. Besides, she needs a little privacy, “To take off my face.” The picture co-opts the cascading soundscapes of David Lynch, heightening the sense that it never seems to move forward, exactly, but rather drifts languidly in a sweltering doldrum. Wind never fills Her Private Hell‘s sails. It never moves at all. It is the moment the hot bath lulls. When you wouldn’t feel the razor.
Her Private Hell brings a trilogy of Brian De Palma/Dario Argento shrines to a close. And as those roads eventually lead back to Alfred Hitchcock, so Refn’s films, to the extent that they are a portrait of masculine atrocity, come into focus as an extension of one of the Master’s leitmotifs. Which is to say that Refn makes movies about how men destroy the things they are attracted to. Refn communicates this through impression as opposed to exposition. The extended, wordless, slo-mo fantasy of a passionate kiss in the elevator that presages a comically gory catharsis in Drive (remembering how the aforementioned shower-masturbation scene in Dressed to Kill ends in bloodshed) is now all he does. Though rarely mentioned in discussions of Refn’s work, Valhalla Rising, an oblique telling of the Odin myth with Mads Mikkelsen as the one-eyed god come to Earth to reckon with Christianity’s incursion into the Northlands, is, for me, his masterpiece. I think it’s fallen into a memory hole because it also doesn’t care very much about making “sense,” yet it makes perfect sense. Likewise, every minute of Her Private Hell is carried by dream logic–a grue-drenched fantasy drunk on the cinema that, during its first murder sequence alone, visually references Body Double, The Driller Killer, Suspiria, and Bram Stoker’s Dracula. Rapturous.
Elle is directing a movie based on a comic book. We see the film-within-the-film at points throughout. Refn shows a scene from it featuring music-video sets and high-fashion models who could be refugees from Robert Palmer’s house band spray-painted into Barbarella-era vinyl catsuits. In the only dialogue we hear from Elle’s picture, there’s a reference to the Japanese Kitsune, cementing Refn’s debt here to the colour schemes of Hajime Sato’s Goke, Body Snatcher from Hell. Or maybe he’s making a totem to Bava’s Planet of the Vampires and Danger: Diabolik. Really, it’s all of that: a maximalist, Technicolor gumbo. Elle is doing her version of nostalgia-infected cinephilia cinema–a trip down the cult aisle of the matinee of her moviegoing experience; and her taste is impeccable. Her Private Hell is everything at once, and in being that, it positions itself as a tetchy, some would say “bitchy” critique of the giants upon whose shoulders Refn perches like an uncomfortably smart, tirelessly mimicking, relentlessly irritating pet corvid. About forty minutes in, the film turns into a future noir in the Blade Runner mold, with Yankee G.I. Private K, on shore leave in a Tokyo that exists in a separate timeline where the fashions are ’50s but the cop cars are late-’60s Porsche 911s, looking for the Leather Man, who mutilated and murdered his daughter. The metropolis is shrouded in the blue mist that represents the killer. K lights his cigarettes with a monogrammed Zippo etched with his name (“Private K”) and epithet (“born to lose”) and a pin-up girl’s kneeling profile. It’s all mood, schweetheart, down to weary voiceover and a cop sidekick, Detective Hayashi (Hidetoshi Nishijima). Hayashi asks who K is, and a shopkeeper says, “The saddest man in the world.” In Refn, it’s not hyperbole. The Tokyo sequences have the forced artificiality of Cronenberg’s M. Butterfly. The sick, self-aware Orientalism of it, too. Refn’s films are about the violence of objectification, remember, and it overflows into a brutal fight sequence involving Yakuza and a sumo wrestler who, like Odin again, loses an eye.
Her Private Hell is metaphors for penetration. If it were a tarot card, it would be the Suit of Swords. It’s near-anthropological in its obsession with the sins of the father. When Refn lights in neon and frames his characters within floor-to-ceiling curtains, round windows, and fog-choked corridors, he’s commenting on how sin limits a person, collapsing in on them like brackish water does a drowning man. There won’t be a more beautiful film about ugliness this year, and there hasn’t been one this beautiful since The Neon Demon (and Refn’s Only God Forgives before it). It’s a glorious giallo, a primal noir (watch how Private K smoothes back his perfect coif with a blood-soaked hand still sporting a set of brass knuckles), a picture about male potency and castration, fatherhood and sex more than anything. The most tender lovemaking involves penetration, after all, violation and often insemination. It is the basis of body horror, the beginning of it and an act of it, what with its fleshy protuberances and orifices, its thick fluids and transformative ecstasy. When we dream, we dream in archetype. Helpless to affect it, we are rendered voyeurs before it. There is pleasure in looking, and Refn indicts our objects of choice. In the middle of a sprawling knife battle, again set in Tokyo, Refn shoots from behind half-closed doors and through peepholes, locating a shirtless Private K, blood painting his perfect abs and sculpting his hair into a Superman curlicue. This is what we want to peep. And beautiful women–the ones Dario Argento once said he wanted to see die on screen, often by his own leather-clad hand–masturbating in the cotton-candy glow of a dream city, manifesting demon lovers to the insistent pump-pump-pump of a new Pino Donnagio masterpiece? Well, we want to see that, too. Puzzle boxes? Plots? Explications? What are the criteria you judged Mulholland Drive against? It’s overwhelming, this Refn. It’s uncompromising in its absolute refusal even to pretend to behave. Lawless, obnoxious, but also gorgeous and engrossing. I mean, really, what else is there to understand?
