Her Private Hell (2026)
Is Nicolas Winding Refn the Taylor Swift of Cinematic Auteurs?
Her Private Hell is the latest film from Nicolas Winding Refn.1 In many ways, that’s all you really need to know.
There’s a lot of beauty to appreciate in a Nicolas Winding Refn film. The actors will be gorgeous. The clothing will be haute. The lighting will be seductive. The score will be entrancing. More than anything, it’s the way Refn meticulously composes his frames with symmetry in mind that keeps me coming back.
I’ve been a huge fan since seeing Drive, but the reason that Drive is a masterwork is that Refn was not allowed to write the script. When you give Refn a pen, he’ll invariably end up with a film steeped in violence and sex, often accompanied by a penchant for incest.2
Refn’s pacing is languid, bordering on glacial. His adherence to narrative convention is tenuous at best, and, more often than not, his characters simply aren’t.3 The resultant films somehow manage to be simultaneously shallow and opaque — a remarkable, if not necessarily commendable, thing to achieve.
NWR does it again in Her Private Hell, his most phantasmagoric offering to date. It doesn’t take place anywhere resembling our world. This is a land of crystals and bisexual lighting. It’s a metropolis evocative of Blade Runner if Blade Runner was mercilessly gentrified and optimized to serve maximal cunt.
Our characters are mostly confined to a glitzy tower, a beacon in a world engulfed by fog. Somewhere in the fog, the Leatherman lurks, sporting gloves adorned with razor-sharp diamonds, searching for his lost daughter, and murdering anyone he crosses in his search.
“What we saw was not a normal murder.”
“What the fuck is a normal murder?”
Meanwhile, a trio of gals is filming a sci-fi movie, each longing for Daddy’s favor in slightly different ways.
There’s Elle (Sophie Thatcher), a star that exists in the shadow of her mercurial father, Johnny Thunders (Dougray Scott), who removes himself early in the story for the sake of creative harmony amongst the girls, or something like that. There’s Dominique (Havana Rose Liu), Elle’s best friend turned stepmother.4 Then there’s Hunter (Kristine Froseth), a newcomer eager to integrate into her glamorous new world.
The girls collaborate with an eccentric dyad of designers, Ms. T (Shioli Kutsuna) and Ms. S (Aoi Yamada), and sometimes they carouse with a sexy man named Nico (Diego Calva).
There’s also Private K (Charles Melton), an American service member who slices and pulverizes members of the Yakuza in search of his lost daughter.
That’s really the long and short of it. The film spins its wheels, offering a rare pinch of humor or a dash of tension, and then it ends. It truly is a dreamlike cinematic experience insofar as once it ends, you’ll be hard-pressed to explain it to somebody else in cogent fashion.
I wondered many times how a film could be simultaneously so sumptuous yet so cold. That’s the Nicolas Winding Refn special, I suppose — lurid perfume commercials billed as feature films.5
•••
When I think about Refn’s place in the contemporary landscape of cinematic auteurs, I can’t help but think about a Wall Street Journal video interview of Aretha Franklin in which she is given the names of modern pop divas and asked to describe them in a few words.
Of Adele, she says, “Young singer. Good singer.”
She calls Alicia Keys a “Young performer. Good writer, producer.”
Taylor Swift?
“Great gowns. Beautiful gowns.”
Of course, Swift and Refn have very little in common. Swift is the human embodiment of mass appeal and commercial viability. Refn, on the other hand, has built his brand on alienation, and his films are box office poison.
But if you were to ever ask me my opinion on Nicolas Winding Refn’s work in just a few words?
“Great gowns. Beautiful gowns.”
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Until next time, never forget that you’re made of stardust, my fellow film freaks.
a.k.a. NWR
Other favorite taboos include cannibalism, necrophilia, and sexual violation.
not a typo
gasp!
The base note of Her Private Hell’s signature fragrance is a clean smell, like an intoxicating body soap, with metallic and spunky top notes of blood and jizz.
Believe it or not, it is among NWR’s most palatable offerings.
Hopefully seeing this today. Expectations are set according to this review.
I know I'm probably on an island with my enjoyment of HPH, but I thought it was astonishing. NWR leaning completely into his “worst” tendencies, daring us to call out his style>substance pretensions in a pretty obviously meta way. Going bozo-bdsm-fetishist mode on us all.
(my own review should be out in about an hour)