One Of The Most Polarizing Thrillers Of The Year Is Not For The Faint Of Heart

Looking at Nicolas Winding Refn’s filmography, it’s hard to believe that Pusher and Her Private Hell were made by the same person. It only makes sense when you view them as part of an arc, as a director who made his name with gritty, in-your-face realism has gradually retreated into a heightened fantasy world. With Her Private Hell, the director has unhitched himself from reality entirely, setting his latest film in a Blade Runner-esque sci-fi city enveloped by a mist that makes campfire tales about supernatural serial killers manifest in the real world — whatever that is.

Refn is an aficionado of ‘70s and ‘80s exploitation films, whose languorous pacing and psychosexual stream-of-consciousness storytelling have been the driving force behind everything he’s done since his first —and, to date, only — mainstream hit, 2011’s Drive. Mixing elements of Jess Franco, Mario Bava (Blood and Black Lace is an especially prominent influence), Dario Argento, and ‘60s Japanese pop-cinema stylists like Seijun Suzuki, Her Private Hell drifts from sublime image to sublime image, loosely held together by bisexual lighting and daddy issues. There is a plot — two of them, actually — but what’s happening and why are not the primary focus of the film. Instead, it’s all about dialing in to Refn’s dreamy, cough-syrup frequency.

Her Private Hell combines the premises of two of Refn’s previous films, splitting the narrative into a descent into Hell a lá Only God Forgives and a conflict between two women in a high-fashion world reminiscent of The Neon Demon. We begin with the latter, as actress Elle (Sophie Thatcher) welcomes a new member of her entourage, Hunter (Kristine Froseth), to her gilded cage of a penthouse apartment atop a sci-fi luxury hotel. There, she meets Dominique (Havana Rose Liu), whom Elle curtly introduces as her stepmother. Elle and Dominique appear to be the same age, and it soon becomes clear that the two were friends, and even lovers — until Dominique married Elle’s father, grizzled-but-charismatic filmmaker Johnny Thunders (Dougray Scott).

The inevitable confrontation between Elle and Dominique is sexually charged and surprisingly vicious, because this is a Nicolas Winding Refn movie. But it’s nothing compared to the adventures of the film’s male protagonist, a mysterious loner in the Ryan Gosling mode known only as Private K (Charles Melton). Melton’s character is introduced getting the stuffing beaten out of him by a sumo wrestler in front of a neon jukebox, and the camera takes as much pleasure in gazing at him, shirtless and sweaty, as it does looking at Thatcher, her eyes focused on the middle distance in an elevated version of the “Gen Z stare.” This equal-opportunity objectification is paired with kinky imagery that makes Her Private Hell a true fetishist’s film — and I do mean that as a compliment.

Anyway, Private K is searching for his lost daughter, a quest that puts him in the path of a masked killer called, in appropriately psychosexual style, The Leather Man. This is where things really start to get abstract, as the film itself descends into a delirious fog of sex and murder before coming back together for a finale drenched in high-contrast Argento lighting. Along the way, we luxuriate in Freudian tableaus where the Leather Man’s victims are literally ripped in half by their ribcages, crying out, “Daddy!,” right at the moment of death/climax. (In an amusing coincidence, a similar device also appears in Teenage Sex and Death at Camp Miasma.)

Japanese fox witches appear, and then disappear again. Characters talk about nothing — at one point, Thatcher and Liu literally bark and howl at each other — for what feels like forever. Little is resolved, and even less is explained. It’s gorgeous and colorful and sexy and enigmatic and, even this apologist has to admit, completely nonsensical.

In interviews, Refn seems unfazed by the idea of people not liking his movies, which is good given that Her Private Hell was savaged by critics when it premiered at the Cannes Film Festival earlier this year. But while the director openly revels in making divisive films full of transgressive shock value, his trolling is secondary to his ongoing Lynchian project of following his ideas wherever they may take him. In this way, there’s an almost mystic element to Refn’s films — they’re dispatches from a subconscious that’s unconcerned with anything but beauty. Those who share Refn’s aesthetic preoccupations will feel as if they could live in this world forever. For everyone else, it’ll be 110 minutes of pure hell.

From Neon, Her Private Hell opens in U.S. theaters on July 24.