If it wasn’t clear immediately after Only God Forgives, Nicolas Winding Refn cares little about what his audience — including critics — think about his films. Why he’s not given the same leeway as, say, the similarly influence-digesting Panos Cosmatos when it comes to the “style over substance” discussion, I’ll never quite understand,* but there are few filmmakers working today who can hit the same highs that he can when he’s on his game. Refn’s hypnotic, highly-stylized work is built for the big screen, which is why it’s somewhat baffling that his latest feature, Her Private Hell, is the first of his films since The Neon Demon to hit theaters.
Of course, he went where the money was — streamers coughed up silly amounts of cash for the likes of Too Old to Die Young and Copenhagen Cowboy — but there’s something thrilling about seeing a “byNWR” studio logo pop up after NEON’s. It’s been far, far too long, and Her Private Hell feels like a sum of that decade’s parts, being a collection of utterly gorgeous and compelling sequences stitched together with the most threadbare of plots.
Honestly, the parallel stories that unfold here really aren’t worth synopsizing too thoroughly. One is about Ellie (Sophie Thatcher), an actress in a cyberpunky future, struggling with an Elektra complex, vying with her stepmother (Havana Rose Liu) for her father’s attention, contending with her moronic co-star (Kristine Froseth) in her latest space opera. The other is about Private K (Charles Melton), a soldier scouring the streets of post-war Japan for his daughter, who was kidnapped by some unknown force in the fog, getting into plenty of trouble with the Yakuza and the cops. What unites them is that figure in the mist, known as the “leather man,” a rhinestone-knuckled supernatural killer on the hunt for young women. K’s gotta kill him, Ellie’s wondering if she’ll be next, and so on. It may not make a ton of sense, but, like most NWR releases, it is cool as fuck.
Her Private Hell — which, in retrospect, feels like one of those slap-dash PTA titles settled upon at the last minute — is a quilt stitched of influence and failed projects. You can see bits of his ideas for Maniac Cop** in the Melton storyline, where the square-jawed badass roams the streets, splattering Yakuza brains before pulling his jacket tight. His Barbarella can be seen in the in-world movie that Thatcher stars in, a pop-art color-saturated sci-fi much like Vadim’s original, where she steers her crew into some unknown land of chaos and crystal. On one level it’s a giallo, on another it’s a Jess Franco psychosexual drama, on another it’s a tough-as-nails Japanese crime thriller, all with a handy neon haze to give it a full-on otherworldly feel. It’s a movie to get lost in rather than led through, with only the occasional rough digital background to pull you out of it.
I’ll be forever awed at how skilled a visual stylist Refn is. There’s a shot during one of the Melton sequences of a fat Yakuza boss making his way to a jukebox, the halogen lights reflecting slightly off of his skin, the only other illumination coming from giant windows slightly lit with deep reds, and all I could think was “God-damn.” The way he frames Melton as a near-supernatural force in his own right, the way he lovingly shoots Thatcher’s crystalline tears, the orgiastic finale, set in what I presume is the Bisexual Lighting Fortress of Solitude — it’s all top-tier work.
Chalk this one up as a personal delight if you like, but I was utterly transfixed by Her Private Hell, warts and all. It’s a visual medium, for Christ’s sake. Sometimes it’s just worth it to be immersed in an image that you don’t want to cut away from. Isn’t that substantial enough?
* Actually, I do know why: It’s the scorpion jackets. The worst thing you can do to a critic as a filmmaker is inspire an annoying fanbase.
** Though, of course, he has once again announced it as his “next project.”