A hypnotic, unhinged thriller with an original story promising plenty of glamour, sex, and violence.
Nicolas Winding Refn’s 11th feature film and his first in 10 years is another neon-soaked nightmare, and I mean nightmare in both ways you could take it to mean! Since his early Danish work and ‘Drive’, I’ve found Refn’s films increasingly hard to get on board with, and ‘Her Private Hell’ is perhaps his most impenetrable yet. Set in a futuristic city engulfed by a mysterious mist, it follows a troubled young woman named Elle (Sophie Thatcher), who sets out in search of her father while a deadly presence stalks the streets. Her story becomes intertwined with that of an American soldier (Charles Melton), who is searching for his missing daughter, although quite how the two narratives fit together is often difficult to work out.
As you would expect from Refn, it’s an incredibly stylish film, full of striking imagery, elaborate lighting and carefully composed shots, but there’s only so much mileage I can get from that when the story itself is such a mess. The dialogue is frequently bizarre, the characters are difficult to connect with and the various strands of the plot seem to drift in and out without much sense of purpose. I don’t mind films being ambiguous or leaving things open to interpretation, but there’s a difference between a story that challenges its audience and one that is so incoherent that it becomes difficult to care about anything that’s happening. For all the effort that has clearly gone into the film’s appearance, I found very little to engage with beyond the visuals.
Increasingly, I get the impression that Refn has retreated into his own world as a filmmaker, making films almost entirely for himself with little apparent interest in whether anyone else can make sense of them. There’s nothing necessarily wrong with that, and I wouldn’t want him to abandon the distinctive style that made his earlier work so interesting, but I do wish there was more substance beneath it. ‘Her Private Hell’ feels like Refn taking everything that has made his recent films so difficult to enjoy and pushing it even further, to the point where I struggled to find much of anything to like. It looks impressive, but when the script is this incoherent and the storytelling so frustrating, that’s simply not enough for me.
Rating: 2/5
Directed By: Nicolas Winding Refn
Starring: Sophie Thatcher, Charles Melton, Havana Rose Liu, Kristine Froseth, Shioli Kutsuna, Aoi Yamada, Dougray Scott, Diego Calva and Hidetoshi Nishijima
