Her Private Hell Review
If you are unfamiliar with director Nicolas Winding Refn, he is the Danish filmmaker best known for the movie Drive, which gave us a stoic Ryan Gosling in a scorpion jacket perfecting the blank stare in a neon drenched crime story. Drive was pretty well liked, although it certainly had its detractors. Every movie Refn has made since has ignited a war in the cinephile community, with the hatred drowning out the praise every time.
Only God Forgives brought Ryan Gosling back in a psychosexual Bangkok crime story complete with a karaoke-singing villain, all completely covered in neon. People hated it. The Neon Demon was a story of the cutthroat world of modeling. Also neon. People HATED it. However, if you sifted through the negative reviews, you’d find that anyone who did like it tended to fucking love it.
So now we have Her Private Hell, Refn’s first film since 2016. Please allow me to attempt to sum up the “plot”: Sophie Thatcher plays Elle, who finds herself on the run from The Leather Man, a mysterious figure who may or may not be real. Her father is a movie star who may or may not be The Leather Man. Meanwhile, Charles Melton plays Private Kay, a soldier in what may be 1940s Japan or may be a figment of Elle’s imagination who is hunting for The Leather Man, who may have killed his daughter. Kay may also be the Leather Man. It’s also possible Elle is The Leather Man and all of this is happening in her hallucinations. It could also be literal, in which The Leather Man is probably the devil. Oh, and she’s in love with her stepmother, who was her best friend before marrying Elle’s father. Unconvinced on if that part is real or imagined.
Yeah, so you’ve probably guessed that people have NOT liked this film. “Worst movie I’ve ever seen”. “So boring I couldn’t finish it.” “I walked out.” “So bad that I literally shit myself to death in the aisle of the movie theatre.” That last one featured some creative liberties on my part.
I…thought it was great. The thing is, after Drive and Valhalla Rising and The Neon Demon and Only God Forgives and everything else Refn has made, if you are surprised that Her Private Hell is a slow-paced, dreamlike story almost without plot with intermittent bursts of unbelievable violence and all of it completely SOAKED in neon...then I don’t know what to tell you. His schtick is his schtick.
If you go into Her Private Hell thinking what you’re about to watch is better viewed as stepping into a nightmare fairy tale, then I think you’ll have a better experience than some of these other folks who couldn’t make it through the whole thing. Granted, at one point the two female leads begin barking at each other unironically and I will admit that it’s a tough scene to accept, but dammit it’s possible if you try.
Thatcher is excellent as always in the lead role. She’s really been making a name for herself in the horror scene these last few years. Charles Melton is fantastic in a neo-Gosling performance that’s all stoicism and violence. His fight scenes are a definite highlight as he massacres his way through the Japanese underworld like some dark avenger. And like even Refn’s detractors will begrudgingly admit, the movie looks fucking incredible (there’s a lot of neon).
A director who literally does not give a shit if you like his films is a rare breed, and Refn is exactly that. In fact, I think he’d be a little pissed off to hear me singing his praises. Too bad, Nicolas. Too bad.
4 stars out of 5
