Her Private Hell Review: Nicolas Winding Refn's Latest Is Beautifully Batshit in the Best Way
Should you expect anything less from NWR?
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"Making a movie is like going to war," it's said in Nicolas Winding Refn's latest ethereal opus, Her Private Hell. And it's unclear whether that battle-weary mentality was applied to this film, but Refn clearly sees the labor of making movies as one that involves intensity, strategy, and violence that often doesn't suit both parties 100%. Her Private Hell isn't for every viewer, and Refn appears more than fine with that. But for those who decide to sign up and do battle with it, it's a hallucinogenic, exquisitely composed tribute to cinema with a story about fathers and daughters that feels almost uncomfortably personal. I loved every second of it.
Elle (Sophie Thatcher) is a Hollywood actress residing in the Tower Hotel while making a sci-fi movie. She's struggling with personal demons alongside the fact that her co-star is her former lover, Dominique (Havana Rose Liu) who recently married Elle's father. As Elle tries to get through the film she witnesses a murder. Is it the shadowy Leatherman, a Boogeyman figure tied into the protection of young women? And what does it have to do with a soldier known as Private K (Charles Melton) searching for his own missing child?
Refn's always worn his cinematic references on his sleeve and Her Own Private Hell is no different. It starts with a woman coming out of a mist that will blanket the entirety of the hotel from hereon out. Strange things lurk in the mist, it's said and that is the film's portal to all manner of strange things taking place over the next hour and 50 minutes evoking different time periods and cinematic touchstones.
Film noir is one of the most overt elements of the movie, from Elle's mist-soaked entrance in a trench coat to Private K's entire narrative feeling ripped from the likes of Samuel Fuller's 1959 narrative The Crimson Kimono. But there's also a strong 1950s melodrama feel to the relationship between Dominique, Elle, and her father, Johnny Thunders (Dougray Scott). The trio talk in overwrought prose with flat affect, their inner rage boiling beneath the surface. Elle has a severe Electra complex, her love for Dominique melding and fighting with Elle's near incestuous desire for her "daddy" to spend time with her.
And then there's the Leatherman, a presumably frightening legend told to the audience with all the seriousness of Michael Meyers. This moment is undercut hilariously by Scott, clad entirely in black leather, lounging on a couch surrounded by women like he's an old-school Hollywood mogul. The Leatherman, according to Johnny, kidnaps young girls to bring to his underworld realm, not unlike Hades. A series of murders soon start taking place and, like an Italian giallo film, the blood and the symbolism starts flying.
If you aren't versed in these genres the entire affair can come off as utterly non-sensical. But even if you aren't a film noir/giallo/melodrama fan there's a moody and hypnotic vibe to the entire affair that just grips you. The interrelationships between Elle, Dominique, and Hunter (Kristine Froseth), a young newbie on the movie, is fun in all their reality show-level backbiting. Thatcher is a solid fulcrum by which everyone revolves around, simply watching and taking in the scene that she's enmeshed in. The movie starts with her saying she's "taking my face off," implying her makeup, but it's clear there's a double meaning in that.
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But because of how static Sophie is as a character that makes everyone else around her stand out in their utter weirdness. Froseth is deliriously funny, taking everything that is happening around her as an opportunity for fun. To her, this is living the Hollywood lifestyle even if it's obviously not. Diego Calva as Nico, a fellow black-leather clad actor friend of Dominique, rules over his brief sequences with such a swagger it's a shame he disappears so quickly. And Scott's broad-grin recounting the story of the Leatherman is one for the ages.
It is in Havana Rose Liu and Charles Melton, though, that Her Private Hell is at its best. Liu, as Elle's stepmother/former lover, has all the bearing of a Real Housewife who just happens to be in her twenties. Where everyone is either outsized or muted Liu turns Dominique into a human, one struggling to give off an air of sophistication she clearly doesn't feel. Her final confrontation with Thatcher is a perfect blend of dark comedy mixed with sadness at what could have been had the two not been forced into roles they didn't ask for.
Melton inhabits an entirely different timeline as Private K, his hazy 1950s world potentially being tied into the sci-fi/comic adaptation Elle and her friends are working on. Melton's stoicism is underscored by a beautiful vulnerability. He's a man who believes he's failed his child and is seemingly stuck in an endless purgatory of searching for her. This neo-noir threatens to run away with the entire movie, becoming a Lynchian-esque story that feel far more fascinating than the vapid girls in Hollywood.
Her Private Hell is an acquired taste, but once you have it it becomes impossible to get rid of. Beautifully composed – Jane Marshall Whittaker's costumes and Louise Bruun's makeup are Oscar-worthy – with a heady story, this is a movie that grips you with its incomprehensibility. It's a movie worth deconstructing, loving, and remembering.
Grade: B+
Her Private Hell is in theaters Friday.
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