Nicolas Winding Refn’s Her Private Hell suggests Inland Empire for the influencer set. Like David Lynch’s masterful mindfuck, the film revolves around a societally and psychologically cloistered woman in trouble. Elle (Sophie Thatcher) is a movie star introduced emerging from a hazy, pervasive mist in a never-named metropolis that, in all its chintzy digi-falseness, feels like it was generated by an A.I. prompt. The tone is apt, given that Refn has recently made a spectacle of himself appearing alongside Kojima Hideo in a Prada-backed A.I. sci-fi short and threatening more where that came from. But whether or not Her Private Hell’s wonky exterior vistas (think Blade Runner by way of Myst) were conjured with the assist of environment-ravaging data centers, there’s a point to their alienating effect.
This becomes clear the moment Elle steps inside a stunningly detailed (and evidently practical) hotel set where much of the initial action occurs. It doesn’t take long to clock that our not-as-put-together-as-she-seems protagonist is trapped in several psyche-shattering purgatories. The penthouse hotel suite that she shares with her similarly aged stepmother Dominique (Havana Rose Liu), giggly ingenue Hunter (Kristine Froseth), and moneybags father figure Johnny Thunders (Dougray Scott) is a tactile gilded cage that feels like it’s floating in an uncanny abyss.
Going “outside” merely transports Elle to other gorgeously ornamented prisons. One is a model shop overseen by fashionistas Ms. T (Kutsuna Shioli) and Ms. S (Yamada Aoi), who act like hobgoblin-ish Edith Heads as they needle-prick girls’ flesh and garb them in suggestive garments. Another is the sequestered set of an interstellar epic titled CandyFloss, in which Elle stars as a space traveler whose all-female crew turns their “by NWR”-embossed phasers on her after crash landing on a planet adorned with life-size refractive gemstones.
There’s also the matter of the masked serial killer known as the Leather Man (Jason Hendil-Forssell). Dressed head to toe in a glossy, glittery BDSM ensemble, he stalks and butchers his shrieking victims like an escapee from a Dario Argento giallo. Pretty poison everywhere, and the cross-pollination of auteur influence further extends to Pino Donaggio’s superbly lush orchestral score, which might have overlaid a prime Brian De Palma thriller of the 1970s or ’80s.
It’s worth asking whether the myriad allusions—which also include the 1968 British-Italian sexploitation film Her Private Hell, directed by Norman J. Warren, that lends Refn’s project its name, barebones plot structure, and similarly seedy vibe—result in something distinctive or derivative. Odds are that’ll depend on each viewer’s openness to delving beneath the film’s glisteningly unnerving surface, much like Elle scrabbles through her own tormented subconscious after discovering a monogrammed cigarette lighter in her suite.
This mysterious object belongs to a U.S. Army private named K (Charles Melton) who, in a bloody B plot that slowly syncs up with the main story, pursues his missing daughter through the yakuza-ruled underworld of post-WWII Japan. There’s also an imitative feel to this narrative thread, the seeming imaginings of a shamelessly ecstatic connoisseur of Japanese New Wave gangster flicks by Ōshima, Masumura, and Suzuki. Yet there’s still something intoxicatingly emotional, and uniquely Refn, about the film, possessed as it is of a sublime tenderness that’s willfully, and perversely, obscured under colorful mounds of glamour and grime.
The cast uniformly makes the most of Refn’s many mischievous notions, with Thatcher proving particularly adept at the sleepy register of his consciously campy dialogue (“Aren’t you the poor little match girl?” Elle purrs at Hunter when they first meet). The men, meanwhile, are various shades of comically virile, from Melton’s lusty, vengeful dreamboat to Scott’s weather-beaten, chain-smoking ruin to a late-appearing Diego Calva as Nico, a club kid who seems, in his horned-up vacancy, a composite of the worst attributes of the other two.
The masculine and the feminine (and more beyond) feel like they’re constantly atomizing and refashioning themselves in Her Private Hell. Credit should be given to co-screenwriter Esti Giordani, a figurehead in many queer and trans creative spaces, for helping to hone and strengthen the film’s potent thematic undercurrents about identity and gender, and the malleability of the self in the most absurdly oppressive circumstances.
Similar to Inland Empire, Refn’s film whirlwinds its way to an alternately funny and frightening confrontation with an evil incarnate that, once vanquished, allows for a mystical connection of lonely souls, a divine purge of long-held trauma, and an ambiguous way forward for those who remain. This wild climax features some of his best filmmaking (of particular note is the cheeky way cinematographer Magnus Nordenhof Jønck frames a spear-holding statue in the background of several shots like Chekhov’s gun) and giddiest overripe dialogue (“Bring a knife to a fucking axe fight, you fucking…bitch?!?”). It also just might deeply move those viewers able to glimpse the transcendental method in Refn’s trashy madness.
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