“Her Private Hell” Review

Nicolas Winding Refn has spent his directorial career making proudly divisive arthouse films with a grimy pulp sensibility and his latest, “Her Private Hell,” is a mesmerizing synthesis of his creative interests, merging the neon drenched jealousies of 2016’s “The Neon Demon” with the stoic vigilante warriors of “Drive” and “Only God Forgives.”

“Her Private Hell” follows two parallel stories. In one, Elle (Sophie Thatcher) is a high profile actress in a futuristic film industry working on a new sci-fi adventure story with a bright-eyed newcomer, Hunter (Kristine Froseth) and her once-friend-now-stepmother Dominique (Havana Rose Liu).

In the other, an American soldier named Private K (Charles Melton) roams the seedy underbelly of this dystopian world, enacting vigilante justice on any men he encounters endangering women on a quest to find the mysterious Leatherman, who kidnapped his daughter years earlier.

Who is the Leatherman? Is he a person? A monster? A God? Nobody seems to know, yet legend has it he comes with the mist, stalking and murdering young women. As in most of his filmography, Refn is less interested in a conventional, coherent story than in evoking a specific mood through expressionist, dramatic lighting and staging. For Refn, the when, the what and the why hardly matter in his search for evocative imagery that sticks with the viewer like a gorgeous nightmare.

Nicolas Winding Refn is one of the most distinctive filmmakers working, with a tight control over every element of the production such that every piece – the performances, the set design, the music – works in concert to create a hypnotic unreality. Refn’s films are acts of deliberate counter realism. Where most films strive for some approximation of naturalism, an everyday relatability, Refn shoves your face in the artifice. As one of the characters states early in this film, why would you want to be like anybody else when you can be unique, made of stardust? Nobody talks like this, no place looks like this, nothing works like this and the resulting film is all the more enchanting for this committed theatricality.

Beyond the artistry, “Her Private Hell” contains moments of absurdist humor, such as when Elle quotes Hans Christian Andersen to Hunter, only for Hunter to reply with an apology, saying she doesn’t listen to European music. Additionally there are sequences of visually stunning action, as Private K hardly allows himself a breather between fights, each time finding himself more overmatched than the brawl before and yet relishing each challenge.

More than anything else, “Her Private Hell” is filled with beautiful people photographed beautifully, most especially at their darkest moments.

While its dreamlike tangents and highly stylized performances will deter anybody looking for a more conventional crime thriller, those who approach “Her Private Hell” with patience and a willingness to be taken for a ride will be rewarded with vibes based filmmaking at its absolute peak, the cinematic equivalent of a special edition of Vogue dedicated to crime scene photography.

Her Private Hell
Rated R for strong/bloody violence, sexual content, and language.
Running Time: 1 hour and 50 minutes

Director Nicolas Winding Refn
Writers Nicolas Winding Refn, Esti Giordani
Stars Sophie Thatcher, Charles Melton, Havana Rose Liu, Kristine Froseth, Shioli Kutsuna, Aoi Yamada, Dougray Scott, Diego Calva, Hidetoshi Nishijima
Rating R
Running Time 110 Minutes
Genres Crime, Drama, Horror, Sci-Fi, Thriller