We walked out of Her Private Hell and could not tell you what we had just watched. That is not a criticism we throw around lightly, and it is also not entirely an insult. Nicolas Winding Refn’s first feature in a decade opened the 30th edition of the Fantasia International Film Festival, and it left us sitting in our seats, staying for the whole Q&A, and still arguing about it in the car on the way home.
So we did something we rarely do on this show. We waited to record. We needed to sit with this one, because as Arthur put it after the credits rolled, “what the fuck did I just watch?“
This is a movie that hands you glamour, sex, violence, and a fog-drenched future city, then dares you to make sense of any of it. We are still not sure we can. But we can tell you what we saw, what worked, what did not, and why we landed where we did.
A Danish Provocateur Returns After Ten Years Away
If the name Nicolas Winding Refn does not ring a bell, that is fair, but you have almost certainly felt his fingerprints somewhere. He is the Danish filmmaker behind Drive from 2011, the one with Ryan Gosling and Carey Mulligan that everyone was talking about back then. Ryan Gosling went through this whole strong-silent-type phase in the 2010s where he barely spoke in anything, which is probably why he eventually ran off to do Barbie. Refn is a big reason that vibe existed in the first place.
Her Private Hell is his first film in ten years, in which he is solely the director. He also produced it and co-wrote the screenplay. His last feature was The Neon Demon back in 2016, the Elle Fanning one, and in the years since, he has mostly lived in television and streaming. We have not caught up with Neon Demon yet, but we hear people mostly like it, and we do love Elle Fanning, so that one is still on the list.
Here is the part that reframed the whole movie for us. During the Q&A, Refn told the room that before making this film, he was technically dead for twenty-five minutes and was brought back with electricity. He says the experience reignited his creativity after years of not making much.
Once you know that, the film’s obsession with rebirth, reinvention, and reimagining yourself stops feeling like a pretentious flourish and starts feeling personal. We came out of that Q&A thinking the man might be more fascinating than the movie. He was funny, charming, weirdly honest. Meaghan’s exact read:
I’d kind of like to just have a beer with him.
Two Movies Wearing One Trench Coat
Trying to describe the plot is where things get funny, because the official synopsis is basically a one-sentence promise of glamour, sex, and violence. As Arthur said, “that’s just adjectives.” Whoever at the studio had to write that logline clearly gave up, and honestly, we understand why.
So here is our best attempt. The film runs two stories at the same time. The first follows Elle, played by Sophie Thatcher, who is quickly becoming a modern screen queen and is good in absolutely everything. Elle is a rich, privileged model and actress about to start shooting a film, and her father apparently runs a production company. The movie uses her to poke at how women are treated as disposable objects in the entertainment industry.
You get different versions of that woman on screen: Elle, who is exhausted by the whole machine, and Hunter, a wide-eyed up-and-comer played by Kristine Froseth, who is thrilled to be degraded as long as she gets to be part of the action. Havana Rose Liu plays Dominique, Elle’s stepmother, who is somehow almost the same age as Elle because dad remarried someone four years older than his own daughter. Dad, by the way, is Johnny, played by Dougray Scott, and yes, if you grew up watching Ever After on repeat as we did, that is your Prince Charming’s dad energy showing up decades later.
Then there is the second film happening inside the first one. Call it the Inception of it all. Charles Melton plays Private K, a soldier searching for his missing daughter, who was supposedly taken by a masked killer the film calls the Leatherman. This whole thread plays as film noir dropped into a neon-soaked Neo-Tokyo, complete with police, mafia, and yakuza. Melton’s storyline was the one that grabbed both of us the most. It has an old-army-uniform character design that stands out against the futuristic setting, and it delivers action sequences we genuinely did not expect. Those fights look phenomenal.
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Gorgeous To Look At, Impossible To Pin Down
Let us be clear about the thing everyone agrees on. This movie is stunning. The camera work, the color palette, the set design, the people, all of it is beautiful. There is a dark Jetsons quality to it, part sci-fi, part Blade Runner, part something we cannot name.
And here is the wild detail behind the palette: Refn is colorblind and cannot see green well, so there is no green anywhere in the film. He told his cinematographer to make it pop with pinks, reds, and oranges, the colors he can actually see. Once you know that, you cannot unsee it. It works, though. The whole thing glows.
The score matches that energy note for note, and it comes from Pino Donaggio, the composer famous for his work with Brian De Palma. He was nearly retired, and part of why he could not attend the premiere is that he is currently scoring the next De Palma film as we speak.
Refn brought him on before the movie was even fully shot and built the film around the music instead of the other way around, which is backwards from how these things usually go and completely on brand for this guy. He also shot the whole thing in sequence because, in his words, he gets confused otherwise. We respect the honesty. We would probably be the same.
Where Her Private Hell Lost Us
Now for the part that dropped our ratings. The pacing is a real problem. We would argue that the first two-thirds move slowly and do not do a ton, and the two storylines never quite fit in the same movie. They feel like two separate films that happen to share a world, and we kept wishing they had either crossed paths more cleanly or stayed apart entirely.
Then there is the ambiguity, which is a whole thing. We are fine with interpretation. We like a film that trusts us. But when every thirty seconds you are muttering “oh no, what does this one mean now,” and you leave with no real answers to any of it, that stops being intriguing and starts being exhausting.
Meaghan’s theory is that the faceless Leatherman represents the industry itself, the machine that swallows women whole and spits them out unrecognizable. Arthur had his own lightbulb moment mid-episode, pointing out that you can only stop the killer by cutting off his diamond-gloved hands so he can never touch anyone again. Maybe that is the read. Maybe we are the idiots who could not crack it. We are at peace with either.
The thing that actively bothered us was a sapphic subplot between Elle and Dominique that Refn admitted he added halfway through production. Because he shot in sequence, there is not a single spark of it in any earlier scene, and it shows. It feels shoehorned in, and worse, it feels fetishized. As Meaghan put it:
It kind of feels like a man just wanted a lesbian storyline in his movie.
We did not like it, and no amount of pretty lighting fixed it.
Final Digs And Favorites
We broke our own format on this one, which basically never happens. Arthur summed it up best:
This movie broke my mind.
So we rapid-fired our favorites instead. Arthur’s picks: the stunning color palette he would rewatch on a big screen for its own sake, the gloriously weird character design (those two cuckoo-bananas assistants especially), and that Donaggio score.
Meaghan’s picks: the across-the-board performances, with Kristine Froseth as the funniest dumb-blonde-ditzy character we have seen in ages, the purposeful comedic timing that always earned its laughs, and the neo-futuristic costumes and makeup that made everyone look incredible.
So where did we land? Arthur sits around 3 out of 10 digs, mostly because he never fully got it and cannot rate what he did not understand. Meaghan lands closer to 3.5 out of 10 digs. Low scores, sure. But neither of us can call this garbage, because it is too beautiful and too well-performed for that.
Regardless of the story, the direction is great, and for that alone, the thing probably deserves a watch. Her Private Hell hits theaters July 24, so once a wider audience gets to it, come find us on socials and tell us what you think. If you understood it in a way that actually makes sense, please, we are begging you, explain it to us.