Her Private Hell

After a decade away from the big screen, Nicolas Winding Refn returns with Her Private Hell, and what is perhaps most fascinating about this film is that it feels less like a comeback and more like a confession. A strange heaviness hangs over the project even before the first frame appears. Following his near-death medical experience in 2023, Nicolas Winding Refn reportedly described the film as a burst of creative energy, a collision of everything that excites him, mixed together like candy in a bag. Watching Her Private Hell, that description makes perfect sense. This is not a carefully arranged meal; it is a buffet of feverish dreams. It is excessive, hypnotic, frustrating, seductive, and often bizarre. It also feels deeply personal, as if the filmmaker had emerged from the private abyss he had traversed and decided that conventional storytelling suddenly mattered less than emotion, sensation, and instinct. Whether audiences embrace this or reject it entirely will likely become one of the major dividing lines in modern genre cinema.

Set in a futuristic metropolis perpetually shrouded in fog and neon haze, the film introduces us to Elle, played by Sophie Thatcher, a young actress living in a world where emotional wounds seem as common as oxygen. Swirling around her is a cast of almost mythological characters: her father Johnny Thunders, played with almost absurd arrogance by Dougray Scott; her former friend turned stepmother Dominique, played by Havana Rose Liu; and Hunter, the endlessly cheerful aspiring actress, played by Kristine Froseth. Meanwhile, somewhere beneath this dreamlike city lurks the Leather Man, a terrifying figure moving through the shadows like a nightmare escaped from a 1970s Italian giallo. Running parallel to this story is that of Soldier K, played by Charles Melton, a soldier searching for his missing daughter as he delves deeper into increasingly violent and surreal landscapes. Describing the plot on paper makes the film seem almost simple, but watching it unfold feels like channel-surfing between a futuristic soap opera, a forgotten horror film, a neo-noir revenge story, and an experimental art installation.

The first thing that overwhelms the senses is the visual design. Nicolas Winding Refn has always built his films around imagery rather than traditional dramatic devices, but here he reaches levels of stylization that are almost operatic. Every shot seems to have been designed with obsessive precision. The city itself doesn’t so much resemble a real place as the dreamlike version of a city one remembers upon waking. Towers emerge from oceans of fog like ghosts. Corridors stretch endlessly into the darkness. Purple, blue, and crimson lights spill over faces like liquid paint. At certain moments in the film, it almost feels like a commercial for a luxury perfume directed by someone trapped in an art gallery after midnight. Yet, curiously, this artificiality is an integral part of the experience. Rather than constructing a credible future, Nicolas Winding Refn creates an emotional landscape where everything exists according to feelings rather than logic.

There is one sequence in particular (a nightclub scene filled with statues, shifting lights, and slowly moving silhouettes) that seems almost completely detached from the narrative. Watching it reminded us of those late-night screenings at film festivals where you stop trying to understand a scene intellectually and simply let yourself be swept away by the images. This moment represents Her Private Hell at its peak. The film is less concerned with the question “What’s going to happen next?” than with “How do you feel right now?” Sometimes, it works a treat. Sometimes, it becomes exhausting. The actors throw themselves wholeheartedly into the madness surrounding them.

Sophie Thatcher seems born for Nicolas Winding Refn’s universe. Her detached composure, mixed with an underlying fragility, creates a captivating center amidst the surrounding chaos. She possesses that quality some actors have the ability to become visually magnetic even when they’re doing almost nothing. Charles Melton, however, ultimately delivers the film’s strongest performance. His Private K comes across as a strange hybrid between classic action heroes and tragic mythological warriors. Much of his role involves conveying emotion through silence, posture, and movement rather than dialogue, and he succeeds where many actors would get lost in the style. Havana Rose Liu also brings a welcome unpredictability to the character of Dominique, adding shades of mischief and emotional ambiguity to a character who could easily have been little more than a visual prop.

Ironically, the dialogue remains the film’s greatest weakness. The characters rarely speak like human beings. Instead, they deliver cryptic observations, fragmented philosophical statements, and strange assertions that often give the impression that someone asked an AI to write poetry after feeding it fashion magazines and psychology textbooks. Sometimes, the absurdity becomes entertaining. Other times, entire conversations pass by without creating the slightest emotional connection. There were moments when I found myself fascinated by what I was seeing while wondering if anyone on screen was actually saying anything meaningful. This creates an unusual disconnect where the film feels both deeply moving and emotionally distant.

Yet there is something strangely admirable about Her Private Hell. At a time when so many big-budget productions seem cobbled together from committee decisions and algorithmic calculations, Nicolas Winding Refn has delivered something deeply personal. Even when the film fails, it fails spectacularly. One never gets the impression of a compromise. You never get the sense that any of the filmmakers wondered whether the audience would understand or approve. This kind of creative audacity has become increasingly rare. At festival screenings, there will undoubtedly be audience members walking out, eyes rolling, and heated debates in the theater lobbies after the show. Curiously, this almost seems to prove that the film succeeds in what it sets out to do.

Her Private Hell is not Nicolas Winding Refn’s masterpiece, and it is certainly not his most accessible work. It sometimes collapses under the weight of its own ambitions and confuses atmosphere with meaning. Yet beneath all the neon, leather, blood, and dreamlike logic, there is also a strange melancholy, as if the film itself understands that beauty alone cannot fully fill the emotional void. This may be Nicolas Winding Refn’s most intriguing idea: creating a world where everything seems perfect while the people living in it remain hopelessly lost. Whether you love it or hate it, Her Private Hell leaves behind images that linger long after the credits have faded into the mist.

Her Private Hell
Directed by Nicolas Winding Refn
Written by Nicolas Winding Refn, Esti Giordani
Produced by Nicolas Winding Refn
Starring Sophie Thatcher, Charles Melton, Havana Rose Liu, Kristine Froseth, Dougray Scott, Diego Calva, Shioli Kutsuna, Aoi Yamada, Hidetoshi Nishijima
Cinematography: Magnus Nordenhof Jønck
Edited by Matthew Newman
Music by Pino Donaggio
Production companies: Neon, byNWR
Distributed by Neon (United States), The Jokers Films (France)
Release dates: May 18, 2026 (Cannes), July 24, 2026 (United States)
Running time: 109 minutes

Viewed on May 23, 2026, at the Pathe Palace in Paris, Theater 01, Seat B16

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