‘Her Private Hell’ Review: Nicolas Winding Refn’s Trippy Return To Cinema

Memories of cinema past and present come rushing at you like 2001’s Star Gate sequence in Nicolas Winding Refn’s Her Private Hell, his first return to cinema since 2016’s Neon Demon and his first project since dying for 20 minutes from a serious heart condition three years ago. Somehow, it was excluded from the Cannes Film Festival’s official competition in favor of films that look very much like 20^th-century television, but so far Refn’s film is the only suggestion at this year’s event that one of its key directors is even remotely curious as to what the real future of film might look like — as opposed to a  mess of known IP and AI recreations of people who’ve been dead for 50 years. It seems the French, who once disdained le cinema du papa, have a little bit of catching-up to do.

The film it most closely corresponds to is last year’s Resurrection by China’s Bi Gan, another awake-dream that aims to haunt rather than entertain (although the two things are by no means mutually exclusive). In terms of art, it brings to mind ballet, since so much of what’s important in that medium is hardly what you’d call storytelling in the Hollywood narrative sense. To expand on that further, it would be impossible to discuss the power of this film without mentioning Pino Donaggio’s phenomenal score. Bringing much-needed context to Refn’s style-overload, Donaggio’s achingly emotional soundtrack guides the film in a way music hasn’t since the early silents, or the heyday of Powell & Pressburger, and even, at a push, the experimental films of Kenneth Anger.

What’s it about? Whatever you like. The setting is a surreal futuristic Japanese city of the most unrealistic high-rise kind, and at the story’s core is Elle (Sophie Thatcher), who is about to make a film with a younger influencer type named Hunter (Kristine Froseth). Hunter is obsessed with fame and obsessed with Elle, and the whole film draws quite heavily, in a similarly symbiotic way (whether knowingly or not), on Ingmar Bergman’s 1966 psychodrama Persona, which no genre director ever has ever not found endlessly fascinating. As they prepare for the shoot, Hunter meets Dominique (Havana Rose Liu), Elle’s former lover and now her father’s new wife. It’s a complication that obviously hurts, but Hunter is either slow on the uptake or, more likely, couldn’t really care less.

If we’re going to apply film-school formalism to a film that intends to live rent-free in your imagination whether you want it there or not, the “inciting incident” that the girls see a murder in a nearby tower block, and a young woman is defenestrated. It corresponds to the myth of The Leather Man, a tormented, Orpheus-like demon with piercing red eyes and razor-sharp diamond-studded gloves who stalks and kills young women in a bid to replace the daughter he lost to the underworld. We then jump-cut to a scene from a breathlessly exciting space movie, with Elle starring as the leader of an female sci-fi movie that looks like a fantastic space-opera version of Tarantino’s Fox Force Five and which serves as a reminder of Refn’s past interest in remaking Barbarella.

Things get more puzzling and more interesting — depending, of course, on your tolerance for ambiguity — with the arrival of Private K (Charles Melton), an American GI on the trail of The Leather Man, avenging mistreated women wherever he sees them, and drawn like a moth to the dress shop where he used to shop for his now-missing daughter. Private K isn’t at all connected to the main story, but as in Refn’s Thailand-set horror-thriller Only God Forgives, there is a sense that, somehow, justice can be willed into life in the east, and there is a sense that — perhaps — Elle has somehow summoned Private K into being, as the father she will never have.

How does it all fit together? Well, it does and it doesn’t, and Refn leaves you alone to figure out the true significance of The Leather Man and his two fabulously gnomic assistants (Ms. S and Ms. T). The genius of Her Private Hell is that, like a kind of visual ASMR, it offers nothing really concrete, just a lot of satisfying triggers and sensory associations. The actors feel that energy too, and the performances almost dare you to follow them, experimenting wildly with their characters in ways that make only the most subliminal kind of sense.

Is it pretentious? You bet! But it’s the kind of pretension that’s been missing for far too long in cinema; where once critics used to applaud Luis Bunuel for casting two actresses as the same character in 1977’s That Obscure Object of Desire, now they castigate Christopher Nolan for putting Elliott Page in The Odyssey.

Her Private Hell is either for you or it isn’t and you’re either for it or you aren’t. Either way, this is a film that demands you pick a side.

Title: Her Private Hell
Festival: Cannes (Out of Competition)
Director: Nicolas Winding Refn
Screenwriter: Nicolas Winding Refn, Esti Giordani
Cast: Sophie Thatcher, Havana Rose Liu, Kristine Froseth, Charles Melton
Distributor: Neon
Running time: 1 hrs 49 mins