Her Private Hell is Refn's new feature since 2016's Neon Demon, and after his stint in streaming platform: miniseries Too Old to Die Young for HBO Max and Copenhagen Cowboy for Netflix, with increasingly patient-trying style where pretty pictures moving in snail's pace and nothing much happens during the hour duration of each episode. Gone are his mystique and art-for-art's sake haydays of the early 2000s and 2010s, Her Private Hell shatters like a glass box within a few minutes in candy colored neon lights and artificial fog. I do not want to invoke style over substance and give Refn a pass as a visual stylist. I just can't, any longer.
Elle (Sophie Thatcher) and her step mother Dominique (Havana Rose Liu) live on a high sky scraper above the clouds. It's all neon colors of blue and red everywhere. It's supposed to be Japan because of the subplot involving American GI Private K (Charles Melton) and two MC characters who appear in tandem? Anyway, a new bright eyed girl, Hunter (Kristine Froseth) just moves in with Elle and Dominique. There's a strange father/daughter dynamic with Johnny Thunders (Dougray Scott), who's always busy traveling but says some cryptic things to the girls. It's Johnny Thunders, he is the most powerful, fascinating man, etc, etc... we are told. 'Johnny Thunders is gonna protect you and take care of you.' Whatever that means.
There's a mysterious entity on the loose killing women, and Private K journeys through the yakuza underworld shrouded in the mist, to find his daughter who was abducted. It doesn't really matter if the two parallel stories connect or not. It's not really the point. But why do we need a point when we have pretty faces in gaudy makeup and colorful lights? Well, they were not enough to Keep me interested.
The vacuous pretty images of Her Private Hell belong to perfume and fancy handbag commercials, not the entirety of the duration of a narrative film. Refn really has a knack for making a 1 hour 50 minutes film feeling like 5 hours. Thatcher and Liu along with Melton, walk, pose and lie around like they are in a fashion shoot. They are pretty but whenever they try to act with the stilted deliveries of hilariously bad dialogue, it shatters the movie illusion, where you get lost in the imaginary world, created by a good filmmaker. It's bad. It doesn't even work as a tongue-in-cheek satire, like Neon Demon did. With its slow pace and total lack of suspense, it also fails as a homage to giallo. And it certainly doesn't come across as Hans Christian Andersen's dark fairytale as Refn not too subtly suggests.
The only thing that is lost in this movie is unfortunately Thatcher. She has the looks, but she can't act for shit. Or at least she hasn't found the right role to shine yet. And this movie ain't it.
