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We are living through a time when we seem to have forgotten that cinema is a visual medium. Once, even the simplest images entered people’s dreams; now we follow stories without so much as looking at the screen in front of us. Although the new understanding of cinema continues to wrap us in the genres that make us feel safest, it has not neglected to offer relief through films and characters that exist “outside the box.” Even there, however, we keep creating new comfort zones and bracing ourselves against the “unexpected.”
It is impossible to describe this strange contemporary contradiction without pointing to unconventional directors such as Nicolas Winding Refn. Throughout his career, Refn has divided audiences with masculine, harsh, slow and unsettling films. Yet in 2011 he created a genuine phenomenon with Drive, adapted from Walter Hill’s cult film The Driver (1978). His depressive, gloomy yet invariably stylish cinema trapped us inside the mind of a driver sealed within his own shell. Some saw it as the perfect synthesis of themes the director had long been exploring; others identified with a character who offered no obvious point of connection and could therefore be interpreted however they wished. Today, the Driver is easy to encounter in any social-media post: despite all the tragedy he endures, his charismatic glances behind the wheel have made him an enduring emblem of loneliness.
Refn, a director capable of drawing inspiration from every corner of cinema, did not retreat into that formula. He almost completely abandoned the 1970s crime-film approach and lost much of his audience’s loyalty with the profoundly depressive East Asian revenge film Only God Forgives (2013). This time, focusing on Ryan Gosling’s jacket and flawless stares was not enough to understand his feelings; a symbolic narrative embedded in the streets of Bangkok surrounded the viewer from every direction. Refn’s alienating cinema—partly sacrificed to his ego—never seated the audience beside the character. We were always trailing behind, searching with tweezers for meaning inside a tangled nightmare. This reticent storytelling returned in 2016 with The Neon Demon, a Lynch-inspired satire of the fashion industry. Now we entered a more feminine but equally predatory world, surrounded by frightening and uncompromising splendour. A horrifying truth emerged beneath every beautiful thing, while the rivalry among models reached unexpected absurdity.
Leaving commercials and music videos aside, Refn had not made a new feature in almost a decade. He finally returned to cinema with Her Private Hell, which premiered at Cannes this year. Unfortunately, despite a cast of striking young talents and the wave of excitement around it, the film left the festival without an award and met with dreadful reactions. Evidently, as Refn’s alienating cinema once again ventured into the waters it knew best, it offered a futuristic, fairy-tale nightmare without retracing any of its steps. How this film, lost amid the festival frenzy, would be remembered was left to the response it received upon release.
Following the Trail of Youth
In fact, Her Private Hell presents a Refn world we know intimately: silent characters, atmospheric spaces, guns that replace words, beautiful clothes and the terrible people inside them. Borrowing the sumptuous grime of The Neon Demon and the diseased family theme of Only God Forgives, the film feels both familiar and alien. As always, Refn never confines his world to words; he continually pursues hazy landscapes and desires that are harder still to see.
As you slowly disappear into the director’s hypnotic compositions, his sources of inspiration reveal themselves. Instead of synthesizer-heavy electronic music, we first encounter a fairy-tale score led by piano and violin. The film’s giallo aesthetic forms a remarkable bond with this music. Seen this way, it is hardly accidental that the characters are portrayed as princesses awaiting rescue in a lavish hotel where the only things visible are clouds beneath their feet and the surrounding towers. Yet behind the false glitter of cinema and fashion—on the other side of the clouds—foggy, deserted streets await them. The threat there is no ordinary being, but a mythic serial killer who targets young women. Known as the Leatherman, with his leather jacket and pink eyes, he is a curious legend whom nobody knows, yet everyone flees the instant the fog rolls in. He is also a reminder of the ugly desires behind all this splendour and the masks about to fall.
Strangely, amid this density of references, Refn may be projecting himself and his fears onto the screen for the first time. Her Private Hell is not merely an industrial satire or an aesthetic nightmare. It is a manifestation of the anxieties and regrets he has experienced as the father of a daughter. The film is interested in Johnny Thunders’ mysterious, seductive authority and focuses on the invisible wounds and obsessive relationships he creates. We soon see that Thunders’ protective-father role is entirely false: he sleeps with women his daughter’s age in order to get closer to her. Elle and the young women around her matter to him only as a crowd looking into his eyes and as immaculate bodies through which he can follow the trail of what is “fresh.” Perhaps this is the nightmare of Refn, who has long pursued a similar cinematic quest: remaining mesmerised by splendour until he sees the mud behind it, and losing track of time along the way.
Death as a Reminder
In one scene, Thunders says, “Making a film is like going to war.” This is precisely Refn’s approach to cinema: seeking a point of balance among countless inspirations and devoting years to finding that harmony, even while knowing he will lose it again. You must put everything you have on the line, even when it may be impossible to tell whether you have won the war. Failing to see your children grow up, and only being able to reach them through cinema, becomes part of the process. Like Thunders, who says he would cross oceans for Elle and then leaves anyway, Refn has spent years studying desires that surround young bodies while swimming through the terrible world awaiting his children.
The defining quality of this ambivalent screenplay is that it never leads the thorny territory it enters onto clean ground. For some, this may simply continue the scattered, excessively symbolic Refn storytelling seen since Drive. In my view, however, the director’s parallel narratives manage to nourish one another in distorted ways without seeking equilibrium. Private K (Charles Melton), a father searching for his missing daughter, creates perhaps the film’s only sincere emotion through exhausted fight scenes that could have come straight from Only God Forgives. Unlike Elle, who merely drifts through the metropolis, and Thunders, who builds walls in front of her instead of sheltering her, Private K’s search represents a far more authentic and flawed family bond. His obsession with the Leatherman lays the ground for the melancholy revenge story of a father truly willing to cross oceans.
Things are not very different above the clouds. This soulless refuge, where characters afraid of the fog retreat into the sky, hums with a profound silence despite all its grandeur. The emptiness of Refn’s relationships—undeveloped, seemingly suspended in time—echoes through its rooms. The competitive love-hate bond between Elle and her stepmother Dominique (Havana Rose Liu), and the dirty power games of Nico (Diego Calva), a businessman who despises Thunders, create shallow but exciting dynamics alongside Pino Donaggio’s magnificent music. The finest moments, however, are the giallo-inflected scenes accompanied by Donaggio’s orchestral compositions, which also gave soul to De Palma’s films. Here the Leatherman’s mysterious terror feels even more unknowable than the metropolis’s most hidden desires, yet every bit as majestic.
For the characters whom Refn leaves alone with loneliness amid monochrome colours and flashing lights, the Leatherman is more than a myth. He is something that will happen to them one day, though they do not know when or how: death itself. This killer, whom Thunders describes with great hatred, possesses a dignity far more powerful and dazzling than his own despite having no visible silhouette. I do not find it accidental that Refn, whose heart stopped for twenty-five minutes during surgery in 2023, should have developed such a curious fascination with death. After all, nothing but time flowing slowly toward death can remind him of what he has missed while also urging him to keep creating. It is therefore deeply meaningful that he places the Leatherman before Elle, who has never been able to imagine herself without her father and can live neither with nor without him. Although the open ending of Her Private Hell does not determine Elle’s true fate, it depicts the director handing the struggle he has fought as both father and artist to his children. Amid the film’s crowded references and uneven stories, the painful sincerity of this relay race may be the only thing that advances steadily.
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