By Nicole Veneto

Nicolas Winding Refn’s baffling, vibe‑driven film trades narrative for fetish—and asks whether you still care what the critics think.

Her Private Hell,  directed by Nicolas Winding Refn. Screening at Kendall Square Cinema, AMC Theaters, and Alamo Drafthouse Boston Seaport.

Elle (Sophie Thatcher) dreams of little lost girls, vengeful fathers, and giallo killers in Her Private Hell. Photo: Neon

It’s conventional wisdom that boos and walk-outs at the Cannes Film Festival are their own mark of distinction. Historically speaking, the fickle Cannes audience — sleep-deprived critics, the general but very affluent public, and worst of all, the French — have proven unreceptive, if not downright hostile, to films either too ahead of their time or too willing to challenge the so-called “good taste” of the world’s premiere international film festival. L’Avventura, Taxi Driver, Twin Peaks: Fire Walk with Me, and Crash (the Oscar-less one) were all heckled at their premieres, regardless of whether or not they earned the jury’s favor. But even Cannes’ juries have gotten it wrong on more than one occasion. Note the inverse treatment of Emilia Pérez and The Shrouds in 2024: while the former received standing ovations and top prizes before everyone came to their goddamn senses during its general release (Academy voters notwithstanding), the later withstood an initially icy reception and earned far more favorable reviews once the right people got a hold of it a year later. Prestigious as Cannes may be, you’re probably doing something right if your film bores, confuses, or even upsets attendees to the point of fist fights.

No recent director knows this better than Nicolas Winding Refn. In the years since winning Best Director for film-bro favorite Drive in 2011, Refn has routinely filtered the Cannes crowd. His subsequent In Competition films, Only God Forgives and The Neon Demon, polarized critics and audiences well beyond the Promenade de la Croisette. And following a ten year absence from feature filmmaking, his newest film, Her Private Hell (notably screened Out of Competition), earned Refn his worst reviews at Cannes to date. Refn-heads took this as a good omen, a surefire sign of an incoming banger too artistically advanced for the critical establishment or audiences still holding onto their scorpion jackets to get behind. Putting my own infatuation with the film aside, I do understand the all but universal pans given the near-inscrutable dreamscape Refn has conjured up here. Her Private Hell is so unconcerned with narrative coherence, so vibe-heavy and stylistically self-indulgent to the point of dramaturgic paralysis, that I must commend Refn for making a new kind of Rorschach test. If Her Private Hell isn’t a movie, then it’s at the very least an acquired taste.

What little there is in the way of plot follows Elle (Sophie Thatcher), a bruised actress preparing to film a sci-fi comic-book adaptation with Hunter (Kristine Froseth), a naive social media influencer, and Dominique (Havana Rose Liu), her ex-best-friend/lover who has since married Elle’s rakish showbiz dad Johnny Thunders (Dougray Scott) and become her wicked young step-mother. Not helping matters –a toxic mist is rolling into their barren, neon-drenched metropolis, bringing with it The Leather Man, a serial killer stalking their futuristic high-rise and ripping open the chest cavities of beautiful young women. Elsewhere, Charles Melton’s Private K, a shredded ex-GI manifested from Elle’s subconscious desire for a loving father figure, tears through a Hollywood facsimile of post-War Japan fighting Yakuza and rescuing trafficked girls in search of his daughter, another Leather Man victim.

Little of what I’ve described is readily apparent when watching Her Private Hell; I had to read several interviews with Refn to piece together a working plot synopsis that hardly conveys how baffling a film experience it is on first pass. Characters appear and disappear at will, the dialogue sounds like an LLM exclusively trained on Showgirls and Hideo Kojima games, and Pino Donaggio’s operatic score (yes, that Pino Donaggio) threatens to smother the entire movie — despite the fact it’s the main stylistic element that’s holding much of it together. When Elle bemoans “This movie is going to be hell,” it’s as much about the Electra complexes surrounding the bizarro-Italo film-within-a-film she’s making as it is Refn’s cheeky address to his captive audience. Taken literally, Her Private Hell is narrative purgatory. It’s only comprehensible as a heavily aestheticized emotional dreamscape constructed through Elle’s all consuming daddy issues. Accept the movie on these terms and things start to fall into place.

I’ll happily count myself among Her Private Hell’s defenders because Refn’s unapologetic personal style over intelligible substance is so refreshing to see within a landscape of boardroom-approved corporate filmmaking and rigidly minimalist art-house fare. You only make something this aggressively uncommercial and indifferent to mass audiences and critics if you’re well past the point of caring what anyone else thinks. Why put any stock in the metrics of public opinion anyway? As Dominique says of the gaudy gold bracelet Hunter covets, “That bangle hasn’t been cool in ages. It’s for the masses.” Some much-needed context: Refn died for nearly half an hour while undergoing heart surgery in 2023. (An ironic case of life imitating art given his character in Death Stranding dies of heart failure up to 60 times a day.) He recovered from his near-death experience with a new lease on both life and filmmaking, which he’d all but given up on after spending ten years in the streaming mines making TV shows that gave Amazon and Netflix buyers’ remorse.

Refn triangulates several post-death ideas (a horror film, a Sirkian melodrama, an occupation-era revenge odyssey) into a feature-length showcase of everything he finds sick and cool — and god be damned if you don’t like and/or get any of it. At no point did anyone tell Refn “no” or to reign it in; he financed the film through his own production company and with generous access to Neon’s production budgets. But where you fall on Her Private Hell depends on how closely your tastes align with Refn’s onscreen fetishes. Are you taken by the visual power of hot people emoting through foggy, bisexual lighting (bonus points if they’re smoking cigarettes)? Do you like when leather-clad giallo killers stalk through spacious, art deco interiors leaving a snail trail of blood behind? Are you really into the psychosexual undertones of Hans Christian Andersen’s fairy tales? Are perfume commercials more cinematic than anything Hollywood churns out these days? Is Born to Die your favorite Lana Del Rey album? Answer “yes” to any of these questions and you’re better equipped than anyone at Cannes to accept Her Private Hell in all its somnambulistic glory.

Nicole Veneto is a locally revered abject woman and acclaimed millennial hag with an MA in Women’s, Gender, and Sexuality Studies from Brandeis University, where she concentrated on feminist media studies. Her writing has been featured in MAI Feminism & Visual Culture, Film Matters Magazine, and Boston University’s Hoochie Reader. She’s the co-host of the podcast Marvelous! Or, the Death of Cinema and a features programmer for the Boston Underground Film Festival. You can follow her on Letterboxd, Substack, and her podcast on Twitter @MarvelousDeath.