Her Private Hell, Refn's Visionary and Incomplete Nightmare

In a futuristic metropolis surrounded by a mysterious fog, young actress Elle returns to the hotel owned by her father Johnny Thunders, an eccentric director and producer who lives a life of lust and wealth. There, the protagonist of Her Private Hell meets Hunter, a colleague who has recently entered that world, and finds herself dealing with Dominique, her parent's new partner and his ex: a situation that will kick off a complex love triangle, in which jealousy, desire, and manipulation constantly intertwine.

Johnny tells his harem of women the legend of Leather Man, a creature that roams in the fog and kills his helpless victims, massacred with an almost ritual brutality. Elle realizes that the story might be more concrete than implied, but she has other, far more thorny issues to face. In parallel, the story of Soldier K, an American soldier, unfolds as he traverses a Japan seemingly suspended between past and future. The man is searching for his daughter, convinced that she was kidnapped by Leather Man and dragged to a horrible place. His journey takes on the contours of a descent into hell and will inevitably intersect with Elle's.

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Hell or Paradise

Neon lights, an oppressive haze, sensual female bodies, bursts of violence, and a metropolis with undefined coordinates as the stage for a film in which form dominates substance. Ten years after the underrated The Neon Demon (2015), Nicolas Winding Refn returns to the big screen with Her Private Hell, a work that pushes his idea of cinema to its extreme consequences, sacrificing the screenplay at the altar of a mise-en-scène that relies almost entirely on a cryptic charm. 

A vision more to be watched than understood, where narrative lines clash in an aesthetic that is always recognizable, possessing undeniably fascinating passages but risking being an end in itself. The screenplay aims to be everything and more: from steampunk fairy tale to eros, from Oedipal melodrama to psychological thriller, from metaphorical account of AI to action sui generis. 

In the Author's Mind

We are faced with a journey into the imagination of its author, with all his fetishes and obsessions, which, however, risks disorienting even the most loyal fans. The poetics, in fact, become a victim of a certain schematicism, enslaved to a formula that spins on itself without going anywhere, or at least nowhere worthy of potential interest and/or meaning. Her Private Hell is a visually satisfying film, capable of offering highly suggestive glimpses, but these seem like pieces of a puzzle that are then forced together, creating a cubist painting rather than a true, linear portrait.

Alienating and destabilizing, it thrives on a deeply unsettling atmosphere, where one always expects that turning point capable of making the story (survive) on a reasoned idea. But even in that ending, which should somehow close the circle, the impression is that the archetype has taken over the characters and their journey, trapping them in a flow with no way out. The same voyeuristic discourse, more interesting for the charisma and beauty of the actresses - the female cast is led by a willing Sophie Thatcher - only scratches the surface, never delving deep into the souls of characters who remain serious caricatures of a discourse going nowhere.