Her Private Hell Review: Lost in the Mist

When Nicolas Winding Refn is at his best, there’s no director like him. Quite literally. Films like Bronson, Only God Forgives, Drive, the Pusher trilogy, even Neon Demon, a magazine perfume insert come to life, there’s no point at which his work can be confused with any other director.

The same cannot be said of Her Private Hell, his homage to a grab bag of international melodramas. At the core is a murder mystery on a film set that can only be described as Douglas Sirk’s Blood and Black Lace, a visually stunning but utterly vacuous mystery centered around heiress/actress Elle (Sophie Thatcher, MaXXXine, Heretic, Prospect).

Delivering lines with that ponderous overemphasis that became David Lynch’s turn-of-the-millennium signature, Thatcher mainly pouts and looks glamorous in a mist-shrouded city designed by Patrick Nagel. Except that Nagel’s sharp-angled portraits, the mainstay of many a 1980s bedroom, had an inherent kineticism to them. The city of Her Private Hell is inert and empty, with only the people required for that scene, or even a particular moment in that scene, present in the room or on the street. Characters often just materialize and disappear without trace, a strand of minimalist storytelling that sits in stark opposition to Refn’s maximalist tastes in cinematography.

The dead air surrounding any human interactions is filled with a strange mist that has blanketed the city, and within that mist lurks a serial killer called the Leather Man who literally tears women apart. There’s an exposition dump that’s clear as fog that somehow connects this all to daddy issues, and Elle has plenty of those. Her actual daddy, Johnny Thunders (Dougratt Scott), has married her ex-best friend and erstwhile lover, Dominique (Havana Rose Liu, Power Ballad, Tuner), and he believes that forcing them to make his movie together will solve their shared Evil Stepmother power dynamic. Unfortunately, the only time they bond is when bitching about the needy ingenue (Kristine Froseth, How to Blow Up a Pipeline, Sharp Stick) who puppydogs around behind them. This leads to one of the few genuine laughs in the entire film, a moment when Refn mines a different form of melodrama, the mid-Eighties high-society soap, for a Falcon Crest-esque dismissive one-liner. Unfortunately, all other mirth seems to be inadvertent.

More fascinating is the secondary plot centered around Charles Melton (Netflix’s Beef, Warfare, May December), as the enigmatic Private K, an American soldier in Japan (yes, this is when we find out that the mystery city is probably Tokyo, even if that’s never been hinted at before). Here, Refn pays loving homage to the stylishly vile and violent crime flicks of the Nikkatsu Corporation’s mid-Sixties Yakuza dramas, where everyone was well dressed and completely merciless. Through this strides Melton, a Tom of Finland uniform fetish come to tight-stretched life, murdering his way through the local crime syndicates on his quest to get his hands on the Leather Man. All the while, Shioli Kutsuna (Deadpool 2) and Aoi Yamada (Perfect Days) twirl through the action like Refn wasn’t sure if he wanted a Greek chorus or it’s just an inside joke about the Shobijin, the tiny psychic priestesses that hang around with Mothra. Either is as likely, and neither option makes the film any more coherent.

Yet it’s impossible to deny Refn’s visual mastery and extremity of looks. The nameless city is  stark and stunning, a perpetual midnight black outlined in neon, while Elle’s penthouse is the epitome of gold-encrusted and morally vacant grandeur. There’s a lengthy sequence on the set of Daddy’s mysterious science-fiction film (a set with no crew, no director, nothing) that feels like the cool fury for which every whacked out Euro psychedelic space flick was aiming. Refn’s own obsessions are also still there, like Only God Forgives’ idea of severing hands as an act of purification, and in those rare moments that Her Private Hell gains a degree of momentum there are sparks of the old Refn. But the rest is too disjointed, too interested in being an interesting moment by itself to add anything to the next moment. If Refn was trying to make his own giallo, all he did was lifelessly recreate some storyboards.

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This article appears in July 24 • 2026.