‘Her Private Hell’ review: Nicolas Winding Refn thriller is exercise in style over substance

Dir: Nicolas Winding Refn. Denmark. 2026. 109mins

Starting with 2013’s Only God Forgives, Nicolas Winding Refn’s cinema has increasingly emphasised a sensual swirl of dreamy visuals and immersive mood at the expense of all else. The Danish director’s first film in 10 years, Her Private Hell demonstrates the strengths of that approach, but mostly its major limitations. Intermittently enrapturing but largely frustrating, the film stars Sophie Thatcher as an actress whose chaotic personal life is almost as fraught as the mysterious, dangerous mist overrunning the city. Audiences might occasionally get off on Refn’s florid mixture of sex, violence and overkill – but eventually the project’s vacuousness becomes its principal feature.

 The project’s vacuousness becomes its principal feature

Scheduled to be released in the US through Neon in late July, Her Private Hell is the director’s fourth film to land in Cannes, preceded by The Neon Demon (2016), Only God Forgives and Drive (2011), which all screened in Competition. (More recently, Refn debuted his Prime Video television series Too Old To Die Young at the festival in 2022.) His latest, playing in an out of competition slot, boasts rising stars like Thatcher and Charles Melton, but the main draw will be Refn’s signature style, which should attract his fans despite its growing familiarity.

In the not-too-distant future, Elle (Thatcher) arrives at a swanky hotel in an unnamed metropolis, where she meets up with other young, gorgeous women, all of them devoted to her creepy father Johnny Thunders (Dougray Scott), who warns them about the presence of a murderous figure known only as The Leather Man. At the same time, a soldier named Private K (Melton) patrols the city streets looking for his missing daughter.

Early on in the picture, a character describes Johnny as someone “who likes beautiful things and beautiful people,” which is also an apt summation of Refn’s more-is-more aesthetic. As with his recent pictures, Her Private Hell stuffs every frame with all manner of eye candy, whether it be his attractive actors or cinematographer Magnus Nordenhof Jonck’s arsenal of trippy coloured lights and languorous camera moves. Gitte Malling’s production design gives each nocturnal location an otherworldly vibe that recalls the dystopian metropolises in Blade Runner and Streets Of Fire. With veteran Italian composer Pino Donaggio, a frequent collaborator of Brian De Palma’s, adding to the lushly doomed tone, Refn crafts a rich playground for his melodramatic tale of death and family strife.

Unfortunately, that tale has been populated by a cast forced to posture theatrically with their every line reading. The screenplay, penned by Refn and Esti Giordani, is chock full of on-the-nose dialogue spoken in a stilted manner that’s been the director’s preferred approach on several films now. In Only God Forgives and The Neon Demon, the affectation was novel, contributing to those pictures’ zonked-out strangeness, but the technique has grown stale – which is even more troublesome considering the characters aren’t vivid enough archetypes to sustain the spell.

Thatcher, one of the standouts of the television series Yellowjackets, possesses the right edginess to be a Refn heroine, but Elle’s conflict with Johnny, as well as with her evil stepmother Dominique (Havana Rose Liu), has little friction. The same problem bedevils Her Private Hell’s other subplots, especially the one involving Private K, who Melton largely portrays as a blankly handsome soldier with incredible hair and brooding eyes. Refn seems to have picked his cast based primarily on their exquisite cheekbones, which reduces them to gorgeous mannequins in service of his underpowered plot. The one standout is Diego Calva, who also appears in the Un Certain Regard entry Club Kid, as a seductive lothario, playing the stereotypical dreamboat role with panache.

Refn certainly still has an aptitude for kinetic sequences, albeit ones that are trashy servings of slow-motion fornication or bloody fight scenes. As ponderous as Her Private Hell can be in its strained commentary on celebrity and desire, Refn always seems to have his tongue planted firmly in his cheek, inviting the audience not to take his deeply shallow film’s pseudo-big ideas seriously. To be sure, there are moments when one can be amused by the shameless showiness of Refn’s pretentious design. But like that mist enveloping the city, Her Private Hell’s charms dissipate fairly quickly.