Her Private Hell feels like a cheap copy of a long-outdated cinematic sensibility. It’s as if this film wasn’t directed by Nicolas Winding Refn—the man behind some of modern cinema’s most stylish works like Drive and The Neon Demon—but by someone who’d just made their first feature, heavily influenced by genre cinema and a handful of directors, and who never managed to move beyond simply imitating the filmmaker they admire. In almost every scene you can spot traces of Refn’s earlier films, yet these are no longer the building blocks of an original directorial language; they’ve become self-repeating aesthetic choices that have largely lost their power.
For me, the most important element in any film has always been storytelling. Nicolas Winding Refn, throughout his career, has been a director who prioritizes atmosphere, visual language, and the creation of feeling over story. So in theory, I was never supposed to fully click with his cinema. And yet, until now, I’d liked nearly every film he’d made. After watching this one, though, I understand much more clearly why I loved the previous ones. It turns out what bound me to Refn’s cinema wasn’t just his aesthetic sensibility, but also the actors he worked with. Because if you’re making atmosphere-driven films with very little dialogue, films that prefer to make you feel their characters rather than explain them, you need actors who can convey an entire character with a single look.
Ryan Gosling’s performance in Drive was one of the best examples of this. The character could pull the audience in almost without speaking a word, creating a whole personality out of silence. The Neon Demon, while not as strong as Drive, still managed to stay afloat thanks to its actors’ performances in a similar way. This time, however, that balance that truly made Refn’s cinema valuable is gone. The acting isn’t bad—at times it’s even quite successful. The music is equally striking. But none of it is enough to make this a good film.
What’s left is a movie that simply tries to recycle ideas the director succeeded with years ago, a cheap imitation of his own success. You know how you tell a joke and it really lands, then you keep repeating the same joke over and over until it loses a little more impact each time? At some point it just stops being funny. Refn’s direction in this film feels exactly like that.
Her Private Hell is set in a futuristic metropolis surrounded by neon lights that evoke the Blade Runner universe, thick layers of fog, and dark streets. Along with the fog that blankets the city, a legendary serial killer known as the Leather Man appears—dressed in leather and wearing diamond-encrusted gloves. This figure, who viciously targets young women while searching for his missing daughter, forms the dark center of the film. At the same time, two other stories unfold. Young actress Elle (Sophie Thatcher) is trying to find the father who emotionally abandoned her long ago, while also having to confront her stepmother and the complicated relationships on the film set she’s working on.
On the other side, American soldier Private K (Charles Melton) heads into the dangerous streets and underground world hidden beneath the fog in order to rescue his kidnapped daughter. All three characters are chasing a lost family member, and the film slowly tries to bring these three stories closer together. Despite all these storylines, the film largely fails to draw the audience in.
Even so, the score composed by Pino Donaggio is, in a word, magnificent. It might be one of the most powerful scores I’ve heard in a film in a long time. The music doesn’t just accompany the scenes—at times it single-handedly carries the entire emotion the film is trying to create.
In recent years, film scores have started to sound more and more alike. Even in big-budget productions, most scores have turned into ordinary background music that plays behind the scene and is quickly forgotten. One of the recent works that slightly broke this trend was Hans Zimmer’s score for F1. But in my opinion, the score for Her Private Hell is even more impressive than that. The film’s strongest aspect is neither the performances nor the visuals; without any debate, it’s the music.
Sophie Thatcher, whom you might remember for her excellent performance in Companion and who, in my view, deserved as much attention for her work in Obsession as Inde Navarrette received but never quite got, once again delivers a fantastic performance.
But even all these positive elements aren’t enough to save the film. Because the fundamental problem goes beyond the visuals or the acting: it simply has no real story to tell. The film is unbearably boring. A significant portion of the dialogue sounds artificial, and Refn doesn’t even seem to bother trying to tell a story. Yes, the film looks technically very good. But that visual quality ends up feeling like nothing more than a succession of perfectly lit stock images prepared with advertising aesthetics. You can stare at every frame for a long time, yet most of those frames leave nothing in your mind a few minutes after they’re gone.
You could even go a step further and compare the film to those people who look extremely handsome, muscular, and flawless from the outside, but who, after a short conversation, turn out not to be particularly intelligent. Impressive, even mesmerizing at first glance. But once you spend a little time with them, you realize they’re nothing more than the surface. Her Private Hell is exactly that kind of film. It looks incredibly stylish, but inside it’s almost completely empty.
