Her Private Hell marks Nicolas Winding Refn’s long-awaited return to the silver screen.
Her Private Hell is a monumental misfire from Nicolas Winding Refn
Watching Her Private Hell, I was constantly reminded of director Nicolas Winding Refn (NWR) and his notorious interview with William Friedkin.
At one point in the discussion, NWR refers to his own movie Only God Forgives as a “masterpiece.” A visibly jolted Friedkin turns towards the camera and mockingly shouts “is there a doctor in the house?” as an obviously irked NWR tries fruitlessly to back up his own exaltations. Friedkin clearly had a lot of fun knocking NWR down a peg or two. I can only imagine the playful excoriation Friedkin would’ve given NWR after watching Her Private Hell.
There’s not much of a reason to sugar coat it: Her Private Hell is a bad movie. A very, VERY bad movie, the kind of auteur-license-revoking material that calls to mind Friedkin’s worst post-Exorcist output. If NWR was angling for his own Sorcerer or To Live and Die in L.A., he instead gifted the world his very own Cruising or Deal of the Century.
It’s hard to start with where this movie goes horrifically awry. Maybe it’s the very first scene of the movie, where we’re introduced to Sophie Thatcher as she sulks her way through some sort of Moloch-shaped cyberpunk cathedral bathed in blue and pink lights. It’s so trite and cliche that it almost feels like Her Private Hell is going to be a self-parody of NWR’s most famous works — Drive and The Neon Demon, most notably. Alas, Her Private Hell never becomes a synthwave, glow-in-the-dark melodrama — instead, it seems content simply lingering in the negative space of celluloid where hardly anything of note happens. I’m not exaggerating when I say that at least half of the movie is just characters sitting together in one room, struggling to carry on a conversation that sounds even remotely human. To give you an idea of just how bad NWR is at writing female characters, there’s one scene where the actresses stop talking altogether and begin barking at each other for a few minutes. At that point, I realized that NWR had to have produced the movie, too — I can’t imagine anybody else letting something like that remain in the completed picture.
The movie may share its name with a 1968 British sexploitation film but that’s where the resemblances end. Her Private Hell — to the best I can describe it — is some sort of dystopian neo-giallo movie about sex fiend fathers, the yakuza and a semi-supernatural being who can only be killed by hacking off both of his hands. It sounds like a can’t miss prospect — the guy who made Drive making a Dario Argento movie! — but I was shocked by how poorly executed the entire thing turned out. It’s a towering testament to the liabilities of ego and what happens when autocratic directors with “a vision” are left unchecked by studio powers-that-are. It’s so bad that you kinda want to go back and rewatch NWR’s more lauded films and see if you were wrong about those, too. There’s bad, and then there’s “let’s reevaluate this guy’s entire legacy just to make sure” bad. I don’t need to tell you where Her Private Hell falls along that spectrum.
It’s a confusing movie but that’s actually one of the lesser problems of the picture. It’s painfully slow and dawdling, with too many needlessly long, lingering shots that are in there solely for the sake of “aesthetics.” Sometimes NWR will just freeze onto a character’s reaction and hold it for 20, 30 seconds at a time. I’m sure it sounded good in his head, but in real time, it’s ultra annoying stuff that makes you wonder if your WiFi went down or something. There’s a fine line between being subversively artistic and a pretentious jerk — and, once again, I think we all know where NWR is situated.
The dialogue is atrocious, the story is maddeningly hard to follow and the set pieces are woefully underwhelming. Her Private Hell practically overdoses on bisexual lighting, with virtually every scene in the film awash in an eye-scratching purplish hue. The movie isn’t just lit like a fashion show, it’s pretty much choreographed that way. It’s like NWR wanted to film an entire movie at the pace and tempo of a Victoria’s Secret commercial. And yes, that’s a FAR more apt description of the movie than it should be — the male gaze is so lecherous here, it makes Sucker Punch feel like an educational movie made by 80-year-old nuns. By the way, did I mention that the sex fiend father in the film is also an avant-garde filmmaker? Nothing Freudian there, to be sure.
I’m not even sure how to delve into the lowest points of the movie. There’s a terse genre shift that comes out of nowhere about 30 minutes in and it’s so jarring it’s literally laughable. The set design, as bizarre as it is, also looks cheap and chintzy. The most action the movie affords us is a flashback sequence where an American G.I. does battle with a suspiciously skinny Sumo wrestler in a street fight. And as for the final 20 minutes of the film, I honestly can’t tell you what’s supposed to be going on. Just keep in mind it involves people being gagged with panties, a hatchet attack and something called “the crystal realm” — basically, a whole bunch of ideas that never should’ve made the jump from first draft to complete motion picture.
It may sound like I’m being too hard on Her Private Hell but if anything I’m probably being too easy on it. I’m just writing about it as a bad movie, but I’m sure a lot of viewers are going to perceive it as borderline offensive one. It’s been a LONG time since I’ve seen a movie about women made by someone with such appallingly low knowledge of what women actually are as sentient human beings. Now, I’m not personally calling it “the incel version of Barbie,” but feel free to adopt it if you think it fits.
Her Private Hell was supposed to be NWR’s happy return to form, his big comeback picture after years away doing whatever the hell he’s been doing for the last ten years. Instead, Her Private Hell is one of the biggest cinematic disappointments of the year — and somewhere, in the greatest of unknowns, you can almost hear William Friedkin’s spirit, laughing its spectral ass off.
GIVE IT A TRY IF YOU LIKE: Women in polygonal bras, the worst Harmony Korine movies, seeing big-headed filmmakers fall flat on their face
DIRECTOR: Nicolas Winding Refn
WRITER(s): Nicolas Winding Refn, Esti Giordani
STARRING: Sophie Thatcher, Charles Melton, Havana Rose Liu, Kristine Froseth
STUDIO: Neon, byNWR Originals
DISTRIBUTOR: Neon
RUNTIME: 110 minutes
LANGUAGE: English/Japanese
RELEASE DATE: July 24, 2026