After a decade-long hiatus from the big screen, Nicolas Winding Refn — the Danish filmmaker whose Drive inspired guys to buy a satin bomber jacket with a scorpion on the back — returns to theaters with Her Private Hell, a shiny-ass nightmare that seems to be fueled by MDMA and daddy issues.
The “hell” in question belongs to Elle (Companion killer-bot Sophie Thatcher), an actress who lives in a futuristic dreamscape with glowing skyscrapers and a fog (they call it “the mist”) that’s enveloping the city. She’s continually in a sulking state, still miffed that her bestie (Havana Rose Liu) is now married to her dad (Dougray Scott), a leather-wearing (and leather-faced) filmmaker/Svengali named Johnny Thunders — I guess Refn is a big New York Dolls fan.
Elle appears to have a very complicated relationship with her old man, who likes to regale his growing stable of ladies with tales of “The Leatherman,” a masked, predatory force who goes after young girls. She dreams of a much more suitable father figure, Private K (Charles Melton), a stoic but lethal soldier who walks through streets filled predominantly with Japanese people, looking for his daughter.
Refn is continuing down the same female-led horror-fantasy road he embarked on when he made 2016’s The Neon Demon, which starred Elle Fanning as a teen model who gets chewed up and spat out — figuratively and literally — by the industry. It’s hard not to think about Fanning while watching Hell. Not only do we have a protagonist named after her, but we also get a vapid blond actress (Norwegian actress Kristine Froseth), one of Thunders’ newest finds, whom Elle describes as “that attractive yet that unfuckable.” (Something tells me there were tense moments on the Demon set.)
Honestly, Hell seems like Refn’s hyperstylized take on Fanning’s previous film Sentimental Value — except here, the filmmaking dad who’d rather spend time with a pretty blonde than his own clearly depressed daughter acts like an aging Jim Morrison. Refn appears to be picking from many international influences for Hell: giallos, Douglas Sirk dramas, Yakuza movies, French sci-fi films. In place of his longtime collaborator Cliff Martinez, he goes with Italian legend/Brian De Palma composer Pino Donaggio — since apparently Refn needed someone who could provide lush orchestrations even when violent, gory shit is happening on screen.
The familial comedy-drama from Joachim Trier opens Friday at the Belcourt
As with his literally gruesome spin on the male gaze in Demon, Hell sees Refn (working from a script he co-wrote with Esti Giordani) delving into baby-faced beauties getting used and abused by the patriarchy, turning into cynical husks who don’t know whether to keep the trauma going or break the cycle. (Just in case you don’t pick up on the whole women-as-pets motif, there’s a scene in which these girls start barking at each other.) But the balls are still fully to-the-wall for this one.
Even when you think he’s going somewhere intriguing — the scenes that feature Thatcher and Liu’s characters trying to repair their broken friendship are fascinating — Refn veers off into some fashionably ambiguous, damn-near-fetishistic nonsense.
Considering that a comic book is used as a passed-around MacGuffin, Her Private Hell is obviously Refn’s pulpy, visually striking take on our post-Epstein world. (The Private K scenes, complete with hard-boiled narration from Melton, does make me think Refn has Sin City — the graphic novel and the movie — on his shelves.) However, this freaky, opulent fantasia, with kitschy but immaculate production design, tres chic wardrobe, and a sense of vainglorious malaise, doesn’t feel like a challenging, coherent comeback for Refn. Most of the time, I felt like I was watching one long commercial for Balmain.
