During the opening ceremony of the Fantasia International Film Festival, Her Private Hell director Nicolas Winding Refn was awarded a Cheval Noir Career Achievement Award for his contributions to cinema. He made an impassioned plea on the importance of a festival like Fantasia and genre cinema as a whole:
“In the mid-90s, when I began, we really couldn’t make genre movies; we had to make important movies. But we were like, f— that! How do you piss off your parents? Make a horror movie! How to tell the politicians to f— off? Make something violent! A little fun, some sexy stuff? It’s the best thing in the world! Genre is cinema!”
“Genre is cinema” may be the truest statement the Danish provocateur has ever made, which is why it felt so painful to follow such an electric and impassioned speech with one of the least impressive movies Refn has crafted. A movie that attempts to provoke and elicit strong reactions out of us but isn’t nearly as aesthetically and thematically interesting as it should be.
With characters soaked in bisexual lighting and neon colors, one would think that Refn would want to continue in the trajectory that has defined his eclectic body of work. But dying for twenty-five minutes before being brought back to life gives him a new outlook on the world, as he’s not only stated at Fantasia but during its Cannes world premiere as well.
In a way, the harrowing event he experienced mirrored a lot the character he portrayed in Hideo Kojima‘s Death Stranding, which he acknowledged during the Q&A session following the screening. Unfortunately, this shift in his thematic and aesthetic conventions yielded a movie that has nothing tangible to say about any of the images it presents or the movies it references.
Plot and critical reception of Her Private Hell
One even wonders why Her Private Hell received such vitriolic reactions at Cannes. Don’t get me wrong, it’s not a very good movie, but it’s also not the kind of movie that will piss people off. People may be inclined to walk out of it, not because of its strong and explicit violence, both physical and sexual (none of them go as far as some of Refn‘s previous movies), but because of how boring it is. It attempts to morph the giallo into a cyberpunk/futuristic visual language while sprinkling in a dash of Hong Kong-inspired action, but none of these elements coalesce into anything meaningful or significant.
An astute moviegoer might notice his inspirations (Roger Vadim, Mario Bava, Seijun Suzuki, and even Kojima), but there isn’t a single one that feels decidedly singular or meaningful enough to yield a reaction from us. Oh, sure, there are plenty of scenes where the audience may be inclined to react, but once they see how little payoff it has, they might not react to them at all.
It’s even difficult to describe what Her Private Hell is about because Refn now prefers to throw the “three-act” structure out of the window and create movies that don’t necessarily adhere to preconceived audience expectations.
In fact, when pressed on this during a Q&A moderated by film critic Katie Rife the following day, Refn scoffed at the idea of a movie having an “ending,” simply stating, “What is an ending?” While some might have laughed at such a response worthy of David Lynch‘s greatest moments, it does reveal how one has to watch Her Private Hell; which is about letting yourself be absorbed by the hallucinatory images of Refn‘s storytelling and try to see the parallels he makes between the stories of Elle (Sophie Thatcher) and Private K (Charles Melton).
A perplexing and uninteresting film from Nicolas Winding Refn
Even then, the viewing experience of Her Private Hell remains perplexing. And from a purely thematic viewpoint, it isn’t a movie worth parsing or spending your time attempting to find meaning in what’s on screen.
It’s also very loud. Perhaps too loud. Definitely the loudest movie I’ve watched in a cinema since Christopher Nolan‘s Tenet. Unlike that movie, however, the sound isn’t a character but a deterrent. Refn is convinced he must make the audience suffer agonizingly to get a reaction out of us, but, again, there’s not much here that warrants any form of reaction. Sure, some of it is violent, and a lot of it is painfully unpleasant.
In fact, Her Private Hell might be extremely misogynistic and depicts many difficult scenes with such a regressive attitude. Again, he’ll present something provocative but never do anything with it. What changed for Refn after he died? He’s still doing the same old stuff, but with nary a thing to excavate beyond the graphic violence and depictions of alpha masculinity. That treads on similar ground to Refn‘s most well-known movies, the Pusher trilogy, Drive, and Only God Forgives. It’s violence for the sake of violence, à la Michael Winner, but without any point behind said violence.
Even the cast can’t save Her Private Hell
None of the performances from a star-studded ensemble is any good, either. Sophie Thatcher, Kristine Froseth, and Havana Rose Liu are all accomplished actors in their own right and have always been pretty great in everything they do. The latter, in particular, has such a magnetic screen presence and old-school appeal that it feels perfectly suited to Refn‘s vision for elevating her innate talents.
Charles Melton was recently nominated for an Emmy for his career-best work in the second season of Beef. Their talents are all wasted. If you like to see them howl like wolves, I’ve got the movie for you. Even when viewed through a giallo lens, their respective portrayals never seem fully in tune with the unwieldy, dense image-making at play.
Only Pino Donaggio‘s ethereal music gives Her Private Hell its only signs of life. At 84 years old, the Italian composer, mostly known for his collaborations with Brian De Palma (which, according to Fantasia’s Mitch Davis, is ongoing, as he’s working on his latest movie), delivers one of the most stirring and affecting scores of his entire career, one that words can barely describe. As someone who repeatedly listens to Donaggio’s Carrie and Blow Out soundtracks, Her Private Hell is destined to be relistened to on repeat in my household. However, I will never watch the movie again.
Also check out: Fantasia Fest 2026: Our Five Most Anticipated Films
