{"id":493505,"date":"2026-05-20T03:56:18","date_gmt":"2026-05-20T03:56:18","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/493505\/"},"modified":"2026-05-20T03:56:18","modified_gmt":"2026-05-20T03:56:18","slug":"her-private-hell-review-nicolas-winding-refns-agonizing-return","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/493505\/","title":{"rendered":"‘Her Private Hell’ Review: Nicolas Winding Refn’s Agonizing Return"},"content":{"rendered":"

\n\tSometime after Drive<\/a>, probably between Only God Forgives and The Neon Demon<\/a>, Nicolas Winding Refn<\/a> decided to make movies, plus a few TV series<\/a>, for the unique viewing pleasure of Nicolas Winding Refn.<\/p>\n

\n\tThis is great news if you happen to be Nicolas Winding Refn, who now directs under the production banner byNWR \u2014 proof as ever that he\u2019s turned into his own brand. It\u2019s also great news if you\u2019re one of his diehard fans, reveling in works that have become increasingly mannered and self-indulgent: exquisitely crafted B-movies for the highly select few.<\/p>\n

\t\t\t\t\tHer Private Hell\t\t<\/p>\n

\n\t\t\t\t\tThe Bottom Line<\/p>\n

\tHell is the right word.<\/p>\n

\t\t\t\t\t\t\tVenue: <\/strong>Cannes Film Festival (Out of Competition)
Cast: <\/strong>Sophie Thatcher, Charles Melton, Havana Rose Liu, Diego Calva, Kristine Froseth, Hidetoshi Nishijima
Director:<\/strong> Nicolas Winding Refn
Screenwriters:<\/strong> Nicolas Winding Refn, Esti Giordani
\n\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t1 hour 49 minutes\n\t\t<\/p>\n

\n\tBut if you\u2019re none of the above, watching a new Refn work can be a grueling experience, making one long for the pre-NWR days when the Danish auteur delivered tightly wound, visually dazzling and punishingly violent genre flicks like the Pusher trilogy, Bronson, Valhalla Rising and of course, Drive.<\/p>\n

\n\tAfter a major health scare that nearly cost him his life<\/a>, the director returns to feature filmmaking following a ten-year absence with Her Private Hell, which premiered out of competition in Cannes<\/a>. The fact that the film didn\u2019t compete like Refn\u2019s last three movies gives you a hint of how numblingly excessive his latest work is, though you\u2019d have to try and sit through it to see for yourself. To his credit, NWR does give us a warning early on when he has one of his characters only half-ironically claim: \u201cThis movie\u2019s gonna be hell.\u201d But that doesn\u2019t make watching Her Private Hell any less hellish.<\/p>\n

\n\tSet in a fog-filled, computer-generated futuristic netherworld that looks like the backdrop for a music video that aired on MTV back in the late \u201980s, the film can best be described as a horror-thriller, though it\u2019s more of a celebration of that genre through Refn\u2019s refined and opulent aesthetic, which leaves no fetishy stone unturned.<\/p>\n

\n\tThe story is easy to follow if you don\u2019t care much for logic. A famous actress, Elle (Sophie Thatcher<\/a>), is holed up at a towering 5-star hotel while waiting to shoot her latest film, which is called Candy Floss and looks like a new entry to the Star Wars franchise directed by NWR. Deliberately schlocky and over-the-top, the production is a mere backdrop for the psychodrama happening off set between Elle and her costar Dominique (Havana Rose Liu<\/a>), a girl her own age who\u2019s also unfortunately her stepmother.<\/p>\n

\n\tMarried to the star\u2019s movie mogul father, Johnny Thunders (Dougray Scott) \u2014 no relation, apparently, to the late New York Dolls guitarist of the same name \u2014 Dominique shows up at the hotel and brings Elle\u2019s daddy issues bubbling to the surface, forcing her to confront the many (neon) demons in her life. There\u2019s also an actual demon called the Leather Man, who\u2019s some kind of mythical horror creature preying on lost young daughters, whom he rips apart with his elegant suede-and-rhinestone gloves.<\/p>\n

\n\tBut wait, now we\u2019ve been whisked away to postwar Japan, where a GI named Kay (Charles Melton<\/a>) roams the streets of Tokyo looking to take on the Leather Man with his bare fists, hoping to rescue his own daughter from oblivion. Who knows how or why we got here, but at least the setting gives Refn an excuse to dish out one gloriously gruesome fight scene between Kay and an extra-large yakuza. \u00a0<\/p>\n

\n\tThis happens around midway through Her Private Hell, though it\u2019s possible all the non-NWR acolytes will have checked out by then. Both extravagant and extravagantly dull, the film often feels like it\u2019s playing in slow-motion, with the cast laboring to deliver lines (\u201cI am the victim of mist,\u201d \u201cI am made of stardust\u201d) that make little sense to us or them. Melton \u2014 whom Refn shoots topless or else decked out in military or biker gear \u2014 actually looks like he\u2019s blanking out during one ponderous monologue his character listens to, while Thatcher and Liu do their best to stay engaging as their heroines duke it out.<\/p>\n

\n\tThere are a few good stabs at humor early on and it\u2019s only too bad Refn didn\u2019t give us some more jokes, because nothing on screen should be taken too seriously. What the director does seem serious as hell about is paying homage to all the slasher movies he loves, whether Italian giallo flicks by Dario Argento and Lucio Fulci or the works of Brian De Palma, whose longtime composer Pino Donaggio provides the film\u2019s operatic synth score.<\/p>\n

\n\tFor fans of those cultish works, which had their heyday around the time Refn was growing up and discovering them for himself, Her Private Hell plays like a nostalgic jewel box that literally looks like it was shot inside of a jewel box. The film is stylized to the point of abstraction; the production budget in glitter, tinfoil, transparent plastics, strobes, smoke machines and red or blue lighting gels must have exceeded everything else. Cinematographer Magnus Nordenhof Jonck (who shot Refn\u2019s series Copenhagen Cowboy<\/a>) creates some mesmerizing images out of all that gear, but so many that they can feel blinding, while production designer Gitte Malling\u2019s lush sets are a succession of red rooms for cinephiles.<\/p>\n

\n\tWith all that effort put into making something so lavish, it\u2019s too bad the movie fails to sustain our attention \u2014 and actively seems to combat it at times. When Refn came onto the scene in the early aughts, his work was anything but boring. It felt bold and fresh, making the director an early ringleader of the \u201celevated genre\u201d trend that brought B-movies into the arthouse. Drive\u2019s sensational premiere at Cannes in 2011 was a consecration of his cinema, but perhaps also the tipping point. Since then, NWR has headed further and further down the rabbit hole of his own obsessions, with his latest bringing him all the way to some level of hell. If his film\u2019s fetishized heroine manages to claw her way back out by the end, conquering her daddy issues and taking on the boogeyman, most of us are still stuck down there.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Sometime after Drive, probably between Only God Forgives and The Neon Demon, Nicolas Winding Refn decided to make…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":493506,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":"","_share_on_mastodon":"0"},"categories":[263],"tags":[10404,190863,11519,212009,40281,32420,18,117,215186,19,17,327,214172,200999],"class_list":["post-493505","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-movies","tag-cannes","tag-cannes-2026","tag-cannes-film-festival","tag-cannes-film-festival-reviews","tag-charles-melton","tag-drive","tag-eire","tag-entertainment","tag-havana-rose-liu","tag-ie","tag-ireland","tag-movies","tag-nicolas-winding-refn","tag-sophie-thatcher"],"share_on_mastodon":{"url":"https:\/\/pubeurope.com\/@ie\/116604894347070953","error":""},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/493505","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=493505"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/493505\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/493506"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=493505"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=493505"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=493505"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}