Nicolas Winding Refn's sci-fi horror thriller about a troubled young woman and an American soldier whose quests collide inside a futuristic metropolis consumed by a deadly mist.
Nicolas Winding Refn has not made a theatrical feature since The Neon Demon in 2016, and Her Private Hell is not exactly a restrained return. The new film mixes science fiction, horror, serial-killer imagery, paternal anxiety and aggressively colored neon inside a futuristic city swallowed by a deadly mist.
Her Private Hell contains almost everything audiences can love or hate about Nicolas Winding Refn. Its cinematography turns rooms into installations, Pino Donaggio provides a magnificent score and several sequences possess the hypnotic strangeness that few filmmakers still pursue with this much stubborn conviction. The problem is that Refn sometimes appears to recycle his own visual mythology without finding a new necessity for it. Sophie Thatcher and Charles Melton remain trapped inside intentionally frozen performances, dialogue behaves more like incantation than conversation and the two parallel narratives do not always create the resonance they promise. Fascinating to watch, much harder to feel.
