To paraphrase one of the great film-critical tweets of our time: Why must a movie be “good”? Is it not enough to sit somewhere dark and see a murderer in leather fetishwear with diamond-studded gloves stalking models through a dystopian steel-and-glass cityscape, huge?
And also to look at some beautiful faces: Sophie Thatcher, Havana Rose Liu, Charles Melton, Kristine Froseth. How about bisexual lighting, high-thread-count linens, or a phalanx of fog machines set to 11? Or a lyrical musical score that sounds convincingly like it was written by the great Italian composer Pino Donaggio (Don’t Look Now, Carrie, Blow Out) and was actually written by Pino Donaggio? Stroboscopic club scenes and pulled-pork gore? Vaporwave vibes and a mysterious, possibly toxic mist encircling Ridley Scott–style ziggurats? An aesthetic that could be described as Bladee Runner?
I could go on. Starlets in spandex wielding laser guns. Whispers of incest. Dougray Scott as a louche movie producer named after the lead singer of the New York Dolls. All of it is, apparently, inspired by its creator’s near-death experience following the serendipitous discovery of a “leaking heart.” [Stefon voice]: If you’re a masochistic trying to test the tolerance you’ve built up over the years to Pusher-man Nicolas Winding Refn’s strain of druggy self-indulgence—and you don’t mind it when a two-hour matinee feels like pulling an all-nighter—you need to visit Her Private Hell. This film has everything.
Or almost everything. There isn’t really much of a story to be found within the humid camp miasma of Her Private Hell. Contrary to popular opinion—i.e., the overwhelmingly negative critical consensus congealed at Cannes, where it premiered conspicuously out of competition—is not necessarily a bad thing. Narrative coherence is not traditionally Refn’s forte; the Danish director is an unrepentant conceptualist who’s typically at his most compelling when severing cause from effect. It’s when this very status-conscious director tries to court the mainstream, as he did in the overpraised and enervating Cannon Films pastiche Drive, that he ends up in the no-man’s-land of cynical art-grind-house compromise. Flying the freak flag at half-mast does him no favors; he needs to go full NWR or not at all.
More on Nicolas Winding Refn
If it’s possible for a director’s output to be wildly uneven while feeling entirely of a piece, Refn oeuvre fits the bill. There are no real outliers in his filmography, at least not since he reinvented himself as a slow-cinema adherent after churning out the adrenalized pulp of the Copenhagen-set Pusher trilogy—the series that served as a joint coming-out party for the filmmaker and his star Mads Mikkelsen. Pusher has its champions, but the most interesting thing about Refn’s love-it-or-leave-it sensibility is that no two viewers—from haters to acolytes to agnostics—will agree on what should be kicked to the curb. I myself would hold tightly to 2008’s Bronson, a brooding bare-knuckle biopic featuring a dead-brilliant Tom Hardy in Pagliacci drag—it’s one of the few contemporary performances that squeezes real juice from A Clockwork Orange. I didn’t think much of 2013’s Only God Forgives when it came out, but the schadenfreude of seeing Ryan Gosling on the other side of Drive being brutalized by his Thai costar Vithaya Pansringarm has endured nicely all the same: The ugly American (or Canadian) posturing on foreign soil loses his hands for trying to act Bangkok Dangerous.
And then there’s Refn’s polarizing 2019 Amazon Prime miniseries, Too Old to Die Young. The series, which was cosigned by crime fiction maestro Ed Brubaker, evokes Raymond Chandler and James Ellroy swapping stories in a K-hole and goes further in terms of violence and vision than anything this side of Twin Peaks: The Return. It’s sprawling enough to find room for dirty cops, sex traffickers, cartel bosses, pagan deities, and Hideo Kojima—by turns boring, absurd, laughable, and extraordinary. (For instance: this bit depicting the LAPD as a fraternity of gleeful, self-identifying fascists.) Too Old to Die Young remains undefeated as a spectacular, instantaneous immolation of big-streamer capital. “They took all my marketing money away because they were afraid that the show would reflect badly on Amazon,” Refn said to The A.V. Club about his 13-hour magnum opus. “The rule of fear is very dangerous,” he added. “Amazon released the show, but they said, ‘We will bury you.’ And so they did. However, you can’t bury a diamond.”
The debate over whether Refn is genuinely fearless or just bereft of common sense—if he’s a savant or just an idiot—matters because he’s a signal 21st-century filmmaker. He’s an avatar of style as substance whose aesthetics transcend subtitles, one edgelord to potentially rule them all. That poster-boy status may be the reason he’s been so antagonistic to his countryman Lars von Trier, the gold standard for modern provoc-auteurs, over the years. Von Trier is a protean talent who’s forcibly inverted the rule of fear so that his anxieties and phobias become reconfigured as epic confessionals. The main reason he’s stuck around through so many cycles of hype and outrage—like when he compared himself to Hitler at a Cannes press conference in the same year Refn upset him for the festival’s Best Director prize with Drive—is because his black comedies are howlingly funny, on purpose. Refn’s immaculately staged atrocity exhibitions are harder to quantify on those terms, however. They’re atmospheric like a room pumped full of cheap perfume and nitrous oxide; if you’re not giggling madly at the narcotized artsploitation spectacle, you’re either numb or brain-dead.
This is the proper headspace in which to begin appraising Her Private Hell, Refn’s first proper feature since 2016’s The Neon Demon, to which it functions as a kind of spiritual sequel. That film starred Elle Fanning as an upwardly mobile young model and would-be movie star who relocated to L.A. and was corrupted by her own status as a glittering, obscure object of desire. It played like a body-horrific riff on Showgirls, with detours into cannibalism, necrophilia, and witchcraft. The discordance between the script’s putatively feminist conceptual thrust—a critique of sinister beauty standards and bodily commodification cowritten by the director with two women, Mary Laws and Polly Stenham—and the voracious appetite of Refn’s camera for nubile starlets in semi-clothed repose placed the onus of interpretation, as it were, on the audience, but it was at least possible to reconcile its stylized vision of Hollywood as a locus of exploitation.
Ostensibly, Her Private Hell is also set within, or adjacent to, the world of filmmaking. Thatcher’s character, Elle, is an actress preparing to shoot a sci-fi comic-book adaptation called Candy Floss, costarring her ex-best-friend—and current stepmother—Dominique (Liu). Holed up together in a massive downtown hotel’s five-star suite in between production days, they bristle, separately and together, about living behind frenemy lines at the behest of the man in both of their lives. “This movie is going to be hell,” Elle says, in the low, tranced-out cadence that Refn likes to draw out of his performers; rarely has a self-fulfilling prophetess sounded so bored.
For anyone expecting a truly Stygian descent, be forewarned: Refn’s pacing and dramaturgy are as flatlined as ever. To the extent that multiple plotlines emerge—including a parallel narrative featuring Melton as an American GI named Private K stalking through what seems to be postwar Tokyo in search of his kidnapped daughter—they’re all treated pretty much the same way. That also includes the arrival of the so-called Leather Man, the faceless serial killer who serves as the film’s emblem of lurking, incestuous threat. Suffice it to say that in Refn’s fetishistic-cum-cinephilic universe, there’s always room for G-I-A-L-L-O.
If you try to take these characters and situations literally, Her Private Hell is tough sledding; if you start looking at them as free-floating genre signifiers, the film becomes considerably more absorbing. There’s something genuinely startling in the way Refn juxtaposes his ersatz, CGI establishing shots with palpably tactile interiors; the discontinuity is hypnotic. The preponderance of monograms—including a fateful cigarette lighter—both kids and reinforces the idea of authorship. Meanwhile, the slowly accruing parallels among the film’s various father figures—Scott’s sleazy showbiz patriarch, Melton’s two-fisted avenging angel, the supernatural Leather Man—suggest a woozy sort of structural intelligence.
The common denominator of the different levels of reality here is a surprising and surpassing tenderness: a tacit acknowledgment of the characters’ bruised feelings even as they’re mobilized as fleshy, anodyne auteur playthings. Throughout Her Private Hell, I kept thinking of Greta Gerwig’s Barbie; with his six-pack and firmly set jaw, Melton is like a Ken doll who bleeds. “Everyone was representative of a certain fetish, so they were, in a way, like dolls all around me that I could place in different settings, and mold them and have them move and say things,” Refn told The Film Stage. “And that’s very pleasurable.”
Pleasure, of course, is a subjective metric, and its proximity to pain has been noted by philosophers from the Marquis de Sade to Trent Reznor. (Average those guys out, and you basically get Nicolas Winding Refn.) The hurt factor of Her Private Hell is real, yet it’s not quite right to call it punishing; fragile is more like it. It’s easy to scoff at Refn’s faith-healer rhetoric when he says that this film represented his chance to do something good with his new lease on life; the enduring importance of being earnest is undermined by his own propensity to place everything—people, places, sex, death—in quotes. Still, in a film landscape filled with filmmakers eager to please fans and financiers, Refn’s stalwart and bewildering commitment to his gilded-trashy muse—such as she may be—has an antiheroic dimension. Nobody asked for this film, and nobody really needs it, either. But that doesn’t make it disposable, per se. To say that Her Private Hell is empty is another way of acknowledging its spaciousness; there are worse ways to spend one’s time than gazing into an abyss.