Her Private Hell

 “Like Orpheus, if I could go to Hell, I would bring her back.”
— Nicolas Winding Refn 

We had been eagerly waiting for it, and Nicolas Winding Refn is back. However, given the result, one cannot help wondering whether this was really necessary. 

Her Private Hell is one of those films in which, for almost two hours, the viewer can legitimately wonder whether they have missed something or whether, quite simply, there is nothing to understand. In the meantime, Refn keeps putting things on the screen: neon lights, blood, bodies, sex, violence, beautiful women, unsettling men, pompous music, futuristic atmospheres, mythological references. All that is missing is the end credits, which fortunately arrive sooner or later. 

Then the ending comes, and a few pieces finally fall into place. 

Refn has said that he experienced a near-death experience during surgery in 2023. The trauma of coming into contact with his own mortality, the fear of separation and, above all, the thought of his daughter seem to be at the origin of the film. If this is its autobiographical matrix, then Her Private Hell can be read as an attempt to transform that experience into a descent into Hell and, at the same time, a return to life. 

The reference to Orpheus and Eurydice is anything but accidental. The images of Greek statues, especially in the nightclub sequence, seem almost like a road sign left by Refn to remind us that we are in the realm of mythology. But here the myth is turned upside down: Orpheus and Eurydice become father and daughter. It is the father who descends into Hell to find his daughter, but in the end it is the daughter who becomes the force that saves her father. 

And this time Refn seems to have decided that an existential trauma was not traumatic enough without turning it into an audiovisual work of biblical proportions. 

The form is indeed the thing that leaves the strongest impression. Her Private Hell is visually insane, delirious, hyper-stylized, futuristic to the point of caricature. Refn takes his taste for artificial imagery to an almost paroxysmal level. The problem is that the form, instead of giving shape to a thought, often ends up replacing it. 

And the music does not help. Pino Donaggio creates a score reminiscent of a 1950s melodrama, as if every scene had to be accompanied by the announcement of the end of the world or the death of someone we have only just met. The music is so insistent that, at times, it becomes a form of anticipatory torture: the viewer has not yet decided what to feel, and the soundtrack has already communicated it with the utmost solemnity. 

The female characters are even more difficult to decipher. 

Elle and her stepmother move from attraction to hatred, from seduction to violence, from complicity to rivalry. There are erotic tensions, lesbian approaches, acts of cruelty and sudden reversals in their relationship. But the meaning of this relationship remains nebulous. If the ambiguity is supposed to represent something, the film takes great care not to tell us what. 

And so women become above all images, bodies, objects of desire and violence. This is territory Refn knows well and had already explored with greater precision in The Neon Demon. Here, however, he seems simply to be rummaging through his own repertoire. 

And this is precisely the film’s main problem: it does not feel like a new Refn, but like Refn putting together a catalogue of Refn. 

Refn seems to have taken his entire body of work, put it into a blender and switched it on at maximum speed. There is Drive, Only God Forgives, The Neon Demon, ritualized violence, the female body, fetishism, mystery, blood, glamour, an imaginary East, melodrama, horror. Everything comes back, completely dismantled and reassembled into a kind of gigantic neon smoothie. 

The result is a visually insane, delirious, futuristic form, often even admirable in its sheer stubbornness. But that is precisely where the problem lies: what was once a precise aesthetic obsession now seems to have become permanent self-reference. Refn no longer seems to be building a world; he seems constantly reminding us that he has already built several. 

And so Her Private Hell ends up feeling less like a new Nicolas Winding Refn film than a film made from the leftovers of Nicolas Winding Refn. 

Once upon a time, this aesthetic produced estrangement and enchantment. Here, it mostly produces saturation. 

And yet the ending allows us to recover at least one line of meaning. If Hell is death, and death is above all the loss of the daughter, then this entire descent into absurdity can be interpreted as a gigantic metaphor for Refn’s trauma: the man who touched death and finds in his relationship with his daughter the reason to come back. 

It is a powerful idea. Too bad that getting there requires us to go through a film that seems to have declared war on narrative clarity. 

The paradox is therefore rather cruel: the experience that generated the film is probably one of the most authentic things Refn has brought to the screen in recent years; the film that emerged from it, however, is one of his least convincing works. 

Because death, the fear of separation, the relationship between father and daughter and the idea of a second chance could have been enough. Refn, evidently, did not trust the simplicity of these things and preferred to exaggerate. 

The result is a film in which a genuine experience can be glimpsed beneath an almost industrial quantity of style. 

His Hell may be precisely this: not death, but the condemnation of endlessly repeating himself. 

After touching death, Refn seems to have wanted to tell the story of life. 

Too bad he chose to do so by inflicting almost two hours of Hell on the viewer. 

And if this touching of death really produced Her Private Hell, the one thing we can wish Nicolas Winding Refn is: eternal health.