There’s only so unkind one can be to a film like Her Private Hell. It is, quite clearly, deeply personal to its creator, but in a way that a convoluted dream might be personal to someone explaining it badly before they’ve had a cup of coffee. It unfurls in meandering mumbles that make roundabout sense if you lean forward and read between the lines, but it’s a conversation you’d rather not have. Sometimes you just have to nod along, and accept that the speaker needs the space to process.
In the case of director Nicholas Winding Refn, this extends to empathizing with the fact that Her Private Hell, his first film in a decade, was partially born from his experience of dying for half an hour and being resurrected — in his words, “like Frankenstein.” All this pretext is necessary cushioning for an especially dispiriting outcome. The resultant work should be riveting, but is tremendously banal, causing a trickle of walkouts at its Cannes premiere screenings, not for any controversy or provocation, but out of utter boredom.
A film of women embroiled in family rivalries, an American G.I. tracking down a bejeweled killer, and head-shaped buildings peeking above the clouds, Her Private Hell is a lot less interesting than it sounds on paper. This is owed to the fact that its vapid artifice — very much an intentional choice, denoting the barrenness behind success and celebrity — is also its overarching M.O. and is seldom modulated as the tale unfolds. It’s a death dream whose dream-logic extends mostly to its pronounced dialogue delivery and detailed production design, though not nearly as much to its filmmaking aesthetics. Picture a straightforward soap opera with gaudier lighting, and you’ll know what to expect.
Refn’s imagined megalithic city feels right out of Joel Schumacher’s ‘90s Batman films (this is a compliment; get with the program), but it’s about the only time the film feels truly inviting. Its gothic exteriors and gilded walls play host to young film starlet Elle (Sophie Thatcher), who arrives at her luxurious abode to find an exhausted Hunter (Kristine Froseth), an enthusiastic ingenue who’s lost her luggage, but is excited to star alongside Elle in her next production. Flowery dialogue, spoken with a pointed plainness, leads both into the introduction of Elle’s competitive young stepmother Dominique (Havana Rose Liu), as well as exposition about her slick, domineering father Johnny Thunders (Dougray Scott), who in turn regales the audience — and his harem-like collection of “daughters;” more on that shortly — with the tale of a diamond-studded kidnapper lurking in the city’s depths, beneath its fog. It’s all a bit lore-heavy for a film operating on dream logic, and it doesn’t lighten up much either.
Elle and Dominique’s verbose rivalry dovetails slowly and unevenly into the former witnessing grisly murders of young women, and then dreaming — or perhaps dreaming into existence — the American soldier Private K (a po-faced Charles Melton), a mixed race officer stationed amidst the city’s Japan-inspired lower rungs. He’s rejected by its Japanese characters (among them, a severely underutilized Hidetoshi Nishijima of Drive My Car) as he searches for his missing daughter. There appears to be some specter of racism hovering around the film, especially as Elle tells the similarly mixed race Dominique that she’ll “never be one of us” (in reference to her white family), but this is just as likely a coincidental byproduct of how the movie happened to be cast. Rare are the moments one can suggest that an element of a film role with dreamlike abstraction isn’t actually worth reading into, but in the case of Her Private Hell, the curtains are too often blue (or rather, deep red and purple) just because. Too much of it feels buoyed by the thoughtless impetus of “and then, and then, and then…”
A more pressing element of the movie’s family dynamics is the way Johnny Thunders refers to several of the movie’s young actresses as his daughters, despite the undertones therein. This incestuous vibe is not out of the realm of Refn’s cinema, but it harkens awkwardly to themes he’s executed with far more finesse in Only God Forgives — a film also mirrored and echoed in Private K’s violent hand-to-hand rampages against local cops, as he dives deeper into interchangeable circles of hell, his one-tracked mission offering no sense of variety in the process. Between all the Freudian psychosexualism, the tactile gore, and the general presence of glitz and glamor (down to Elle starring in a bedazzled Star Trek send-up), several of Refn’s previous movies are reborn here as less polished, less exacting versions of themselves, as though he were still trying to exorcise his neon demons.
As the movie trudges along, from imagined place to place, its rhythms seldom cohere, resulting in a lethargic unspooling as scenes re- and de-materialize practically at random. If the idea that there’s nothing beneath the movie’s surface is the point, then it’s not a point worth getting on board with — but the film is also not entirely purposeless, despite feeling that way for lengthy stretches. The psychological blurring of sex and violence has always played a part in Refn’s cinema, and the gory killings and defenestrations of young women in Her Private Hell exist firmly in this murky overlap. That they’re are frequently killed in moments of heightened sexual pleasure (and are often ripped open from within) is the closest the movie comes to becoming truly nightmarish — at least the first of several times this happens — hinting towards a latent anxiety as it relates to Refn as a father of young adult women himself.
If the film is truly about anything, it’s an attempt at expressing his discomfort with being a girl-dad who has to reckon with his daughters entering the world as sexual beings — a world his artistry has both reflected and filled with violent sexual volatility. However, that these ideas exist, somewhere in the movie’s recesses, makes it all the more disappointing that they’re embodied by some of the most languid genre filmmaking you’re likely to see this year, as though someone had generated a digital simulacrum based on descriptions of Refn’s previous work. It all resembles things he’s done before, but it never captures the same soul, excitement or intrigue, leaving only semi-familiar images with no momentum of their own, and no new meaning created by their union.
To say that you’ll benefit from rewatching Only God Forgives or The Neon Demon (or the much seedier Pusher trilogy) as a palette cleaner presupposes that Her Private Hell would leave you wanting to revisit Refn’s work at all. Take it from a fan: it’s much more likely that his latest will pull the curtain so far back on his audiovisual sleight of hand that you might be left allergic to his style in the first place.