There comes a point when a director leans so much into their own hyper-stylized vision that they completely lose their touch, and Nicolas Winding Refn has reached it. His new film, Her Private Hell, shares much of the same DNA as his previous two films, The Neon Demon (2016) and Only God Forgives (2013), including their faults.
The film becomes so wrapped up in its striking visual language and the rigidity of Refn’s directorial style that even those who are well-versed in his mode of storytelling will struggle to access the actual intentions of the film. While it’s respectable that a director is so unwavering in the stylistic flair that makes his films unique, it’s tough to meaningfully engage with a movie like this that is self-serious to the point of alienation.
The story follows two concurrent plotlines, each with their own protagonist. One follows an actress named Elle (Sophie Thatcher), who is trapped in a complicated dynamic between herself, her film director father, and her stepmother. The other follows a soldier named Private K (Charles Melton) who is searching for his daughter who has likely been kidnapped or killed. At the center of it all is the film’s main antagonist, a vaguely demonic pseudo-slasher villain called the Leatherman who murders young women.
All the emotional tethers that should exist in this film – a grieving father looking for his daughter, or a daughter longing to reconnect with her emotionally distant father – are kept out of reach behind meticulously staged shots and uncomfortably stiff performances.
There’s no doubt that Refn knows how to craft an image. However, that doesn’t always translate into being a visual storyteller, and in the case of Her Private Hell, it certainly doesn’t. Every single frame of this film is immaculately constructed and yet evocative of nothing. And seeing as film is a storytelling medium, it’s a big problem when your nearly two-hour runtime doesn’t have the faintest sense of a cohesive narrative. Not to mention that Refn employs several lazy and, at times, even problematic, storytelling devices to attempt to make the so-called plot of this movie make even the slightest bit of sense.
The futuristic, vaguely post-apocalyptic landscape is attributed to something called the mist, which seems to describe some sort of fog that descended upon the world and made everything bad. The viewer has no understanding of what the mist is beyond that, and yet it is used to explain away every confusing aspect of the film’s setting. What is clearly meant to be a mysterious blight upon humanity is not thought-provoking in the least, and instead feels like an incredibly weak attempt at worldbuilding.
The spoken language of the film is confusing, too, as it oscillates between casual modern vernacular, overly-written attempts at thought-provoking dialogue, and occasional lines thrown in to remind the audience that this takes place in a science-fiction reality. It makes it hard to understand what kind of tone is meant to be achieved.
Then there’s the way Refn handles violence against women. This has long been a problem in his work, and the more repetitive it becomes, the more bad faith it feels. Her Private Hell uses barbaric acts of violence committed by men against young women as a means to propel its plot, but is entirely uninterested in the weight of what is being portrayed. The larger implications of the Leatherman are clearly of no concern to Refn. It leaves every woman in the film feeling like a victim while letting its male lead be a rugged action movie star.
It’s hard to hold the actors at fault for the lack of dynamism or emotional accessibility in their performances, as Refn’s extremely controlled stylization intentionally keeps the audience at a distance, but they still leave much to be desired. For a film titled Her Private Hell, Sophie Thatcher’s Elle has no sense of interiority, and it’s tough to parse her motivations throughout the film. The audience never gets a real sense of her supposedly complicated relationship with her father, nor with his new wife, Dominique (Havana Rose Liu), who also happens to be an old friend of Elle’s. The pair of women also have a largely undefined, tense, psychosexual relationship that is never properly explored.
In fact, the film hardly explores any of its ideas, as it frequently cuts back and forth between Elle and Private K, a decision clearly intended to draw connections between the pair, but that instead leaves both of their stories underdeveloped. When their stories finally collide, it carries no narrative or emotional weight, and the film’s conclusion is entirely underwhelming.
It’s tough not to root for a filmmaker who makes movies that look this good, but Refn is going to have to deliver on more than just looks in the future if he wants to keep an audience engaged. Her Private Hell practically invites the viewer to zone out, because the more you think about anything beyond the visuals, the less appealing it becomes, and you’ll be left simply waiting for it to be over.
Review Courtesy of Claire May Lewis
Feature image Credit to NEON