‘Her Private Hell’ Review: Refn’s Return Gets Lost in a Psychosexual Morass

Nicolas Winding Refn took a 10-year break from feature filmmaking, instead turning his attention to the limited series Too Old to Die Young and Copenhagen Cowboy. He has now returned to movies with Her Private Hell, and his first feature since 2016’s The Neon Demon shows him retaining his distinctive visuals that intend to push and unnerve his audience. And yet there’s something a little tired and frustrating throughout this psychosexual trip through colorful waters. While it would be overstating matters to say Her Private Hell is all style and no substance, Refn appears unconcerned with any coherence beneath his distinctive visuals. There’s not a captivating emotion or idea on which to hang the picture, and so a movie that's aggressively hued, sexualized, and occasionally violent becomes cold and distant.

Wobbling on a thin narrative thread, we follow Elle (Sophie Thatcher), an actor and daughter of distant director Johnny Thunders (Dougray Scott), who appears to collect beautiful women like Elle’s former friend and now stepmother Dominique (Havana Rose Liu) as well as enthusiastic newcomer Hunter (Kristine Froseth). The women are working on some kind of sci-fi feature, but they’ve also learned from Johnny about a mythical underworld featuring “The Leatherman,” a violent figure who has a habit of ripping young women open. Elle also learns of a young soldier, Private K (Charles Melton), looking for his lost daughter and who ends up fighting the Yakuza. These worlds collide as Elle wrestles with her feelings towards her father and stepmother.

Perhaps the biggest problem with Her Private Hell is that it lacks specificity. For all the lavishness of the shots (and Refn certainly loves his tableaus), they’re frustratingly broad, luring us into a fantasia that also feels oddly empty. For example, there’s a reading of the film that could be about the fraught nature of being a white knight figure, seeking both to protect female virginity while also desiring to take that virginity (hence the explosion of blood signifying the breaking of the hymen). But you could just as easily read the film as an Elektra complex on behalf of Elle, wrestling with her conflicted sexual desires manifested by Dominique taking her father’s affections. While no rule says it can’t be both, the ideas rarely feel like part of the same piece.

And although these aren’t bad ideas upon which to build a psychosexual thriller, within Elle’s “private hell,” we don’t have much reason to care because little of it feels particularly real or immediate. We’re dwelling in a surreal realm of myth, folklore, and half-rendered desires, but even as “a vibe,” Refn doesn’t compel us to go deeper. It’s not even so much that the film eschews traditional narrative as much as it seems content to slather on candy-coated visuals regardless of any emotional connection. I was reminded of David Lynch’s films like Eraserhead and Lost Highway, which aren’t trying to be narratively tidy, but they cohere on a visual, emotional level that Her Private Hell never does.

That’s particularly a shame because Thatcher and Melton are so good at conveying the passion that eludes the rest of the movie. Despite the bright colors and high contrasts, the only heat comes from those two actors, and they don’t have to do much other than be hot and smoldering. Granted, it’s not a high bar to ask two attractive people to be attractive, but at least they’re conveying an emotional intensity that isn’t found elsewhere in the movie. Refn has such magnetic performances and doesn’t seem to know what to do with them.

I don’t begrudge Refn moving into a more psychosexual realm or untethering himself from traditional narrative. Valhalla Rising isn’t my favorite film, but it’s at least interesting and has a captivating Mads Mikkelsen performance at its center. Only God Forgives is similar to Her Private Hell in how it moves lugubriously through neon-drenched environs, but that film feels like it’s adding up to a pointed and fascinating critique of colonialism. And as much as I love Drive and enjoy the Pusher trilogy, I don’t think every Refn effort should seek to repeat the exhilaration of those crime thrillers.

The problem of Her Private Hell is you’re left wondering why you should ever bother caring. It keeps flirting with interesting ideas like sexual turmoil, white knight personas, and how Elle and her compatriots are always locked in some kind of performance, but the surrounding surrealism never brings us closer to any idea or emotional truth. If this is a coming-of-age story for Elle, then everything with Private K feels like another myth set atop the belabored myth of The Leatherman. It’s a swirling hodgepodge that never lures us deeper into this underworld as much as it puts us to sleep.

Her Private Hell opens in theaters on July 24^th.

Matt Goldberg is a film and TV critic who runs the newsletter Commentary Track.