Her Private Hell (Nicolas Winding Refn, 2026)

[yoloswegmaster]

Refn's Her Private Hell will be released in theaters on July 24

[brundlefly]

Teasing Nicolas Winding Refn's Her Private Hell.

[The Curious Sofa]

The reviews for Her Private Hell are savage, even apologists for Only God Forgives and Neon Demon seem to hate it.

[John Cope]

The reviews for Her Private Hell are savage, even apologists for Only God Forgives and Neon Demon seem to hate it.

Not this one. For me, its negative buzz makes it that much more intoxicating.

[The Curious Sofa]

Even before I clicked on the link, I suspected it was going to be Peter Bradshaw. An endorsement from him rarely is a good sign as far as I'm concerned. I was hoping that Refn would make another film that I liked but I thought his last two films were already bafflingly awful (I skipped the TV series), so I doubt I'll become a cheerleader for this. The only thing that could tempt me to give this a shot is a score by Pino Donaggio.

[wattsup32]

Her Private Hell:

Please offer thoughts once you've seen it. Despite lovely lighting, composition, and a terrific score, I found it baffling overall. I got the feeling right away that this was NWR's attempt at creating something Lynch-like, and almost no one can do that. NWR does not prove to be an exception to that rule. Though, I would love to be persuaded otherwise.

[therewillbeblus]

I won't be persuasive in that direction. Her Private Hell feels like weirdness for weirdness' sake, Refn pushing the boundaries of his aesthetic until there's no more space for narrative flow. Not even Charles Melton being inherently awesome can save this film. I can't help but wonder if it was more of a miniseries in his mind - like his last two projects, one of which was successful, the other less so - since the confounding 'story' felt neglected with excisions and therefore vacuous. Not that I wanted more of this or anything!

[mfunk9786]

I won't be persuasive in that direction. Her Private Hell feels like weirdness for weirdness' sake, Refn pushing the boundaries of his aesthetic until there's no more space for narrative flow. Not even Charles Melton being inherently awesome can save this film. I can't help but wonder if it was more of a miniseries in his mind - like his last two projects, one of which was successful, the other less so - since the confounding 'story' felt neglected with excisions and therefore vacuous. Not that I wanted more of this or anything!

I can't believe that I lucidly sat in the same room with this film and came away with so little appreciation for anything Refn was doing - I usually enjoy his work quite a bit more than the median viewer. But this was complete and utter nonsense, not rooted in any kind of reality or even absence of it. Horribly wooden dialogue (if you thought The Neon Demon or Drive had somewhat stilted dialogue, this is on another planet), a plot that is ... I'd say it was confusing but that would be too much of a compliment. It's just nonsensical and exhausting. And a visual style that doesn't offer the usual respite that it does in his other films... the movie looks like a Prada ad at best and an amateur film at worst (any coincidence that 'the fog' obscures most of our view of the set design?). What the fuck even was this movie? Talking about it is making my head hurt.

[wattsup32]

Thanks to you both. I just kept sitting there thinking I must be missing something or that there was something I wasn't understanding for some reason. I guess that is still possible, but if it is, at least I am in good company.

There do not seem to be any rules set up for this universe (other than the clearly defined hands thing). So, everything that happens just sort of happens without cause and without much of an effect. Even in moments one might point to as an effect,

Spoiler

the young starlet having her chest ripped open

, doesn't have any narrative effect. Instead the "effect' is just something that happens as a result of a particular action, but there is no real mention of it after, nor is there any consequence to any character in the film because of it.

Alright, gents. Thanks for the thoughts. I will not be giving this one another chance.

[mfunk9786]

This is a filmmaker that has earned enough goodwill from me that I want to be the contrarian who likes this film and is turning his nose up at those who 'don't get it.' Well, maybe I'm kidding a little bit there. But it stings that I'm probably in your camp, wattsup32, in that I can't imagine wasting more time trying to pull this one apart.

[Walter Kurtz]

I watched Only God Forgives once upon a time on Kanopy. That was my private hell.

[dda1996a]

Man, I lost touch with Refn after he went the TV route and it seems I should stick with it. Which of his tv shows was good? I actually did rather enjoy Neon Demon back in the day but never felt the need to return to it, for fear of finding it as shallow as everyone else thought it was (I found it funny and fun but was much more impressionable back then)

[therewillbeblus]

Which of his tv shows was good?

Too Old to Die Young is his masterpiece

[yoshimori]

Too Old to Die Young is his masterpiece

You mean Copenhagen Cowboy?

Obviously, tastes vary. For me, Only God Forgives and CC are Refn's most thrilling works so far. Will see Her Private Hell tonight.

[thirtyframesasecond]

I don't even think Drive has aged that well, tbh.

[Monterey Jack]

Fifteen years ago, floating out of a screening of Drive like a cartoon character smelling a pie cooking on a windowsill, I thought that Refn would become the new Michael Mann, Instead, he's become the Zack Snyder of Sucker Punch. This was EXCRUCIATINGLY bad, incoherent and boring. Only Pino Donaggio's gorgeous score kept me from walking out. There's not a moment in the film that holds together, either on a basic narrative or subtextual level. This was in desperate need of less artsy, and more fartsy. Worst movie since The Bride! (at least that had some unintentional yuks).

[beamish14]

I don't even think Drive has aged that well, tbh.

At the time of its release, I’d basically written him off. I didn’t think that things could get worse than Fear X, and he scored an amazing left-field critical and commercial success with Drive

What I’m really grateful for is that film gave him the capital to restore really great, underseen gems like Rick Schmidt’s Emerald Cities

[John Cope]

This turned to be very much what I expected it to be. It is indeed in the same stylistic vein as Cosmatos, Mandico, Cattet / Forzani and Anger (Refn gets Anger-ry) but also certainly Lynch. This is not the first time Refn's work has evoked the spirit and style of Lynch (that would be Fear X well over twenty years ago) but he has been moving for quite a while now in the direction of late Lynch obtuseness and here that reaches an apex point. It is hard to imagine Refn's own style in this direction being able to get much more refined or rarefied than this. It is a film that one simply has to give over to, to submit to on its own terms. But it is not enough to say this, that we have to determine its accomplishment on its own terms, as it seeks to remake and define those very terms; it is far more comprehensive in its ambition than it may seem. In this regard then Refn's notorious iconoclastic nature and enfant terrible attitude, his vocal disregard for audiences (voiced here through the characters) has more to do with an acknowledgment of an inevitability. Something like this was never going to work for everyone or maybe even hardly anyone. It is an intensively and insistently subconscious work, as though brought forth directly from that realm and also predicated on abstraction rather than character or narrative and there is an implicit tension in that given the literalizing tendencies of concretized images. For Refn here (and elsewhere but especially here) all the conventions and traditional means of audience engagement and dramatic satisfaction are put purely to the service of getting somewhere else or getting at something else.

Immediately from the beginning we are confronted by what seem almost like defiantly parodic efforts. The extreme studied affect of the performance style is put at odds with the hyperbolic score (courtesy of Pino Donaggio, master of overheated and melodramatic orchestration) and what is implicitly absurd is pointed up and highlighted rather than denied or downplayed. Refn emphasizes the elements of horror, sci-fi, action and ridiculously risible erotic spectacle, all of that consciously deployed and laid out even as the framework also very much draws upon details of the Norman J. Warren film of the same name. There are lots of genres tumbling on top of one another in other words and he allows for all of these facets oscillating and transmuting all the time until finally at the same time. So then none of these specifics undercut one another but rather enhance or complement one another through seeming conflict. The layers begin to collapse in on themselves and dismantle boundaries (such as in the sci-fi film within the film which is breezily just drifted away from when some other more insistent interest or influence comes up and yet eventually provides the stage for the final symbolic confrontation, transformed fully into a purely mental landscape). To escape this purgatorial state of symbolist surrealism the characters must give over and give way as we must and that is entirely reliant upon the collapse of identities and a relinquishment of difference and opposition; if there is any resolution to this that is it.