Joel on Film

In one of the first scenes of Her Private Hell, the young female protagonist welcomes another young woman into her apartment, to which the second woman gasps in awe and offers a colorful expletive to underline it—and understandably so, too. The place is gaudy with gold drapery and wallpaper and features a long foyer leading to a lavish living room and a view that’s likely second to none. As for what’s in the apartment itself, well, it’s only about a quarter furnished, with a couch here and a few armchairs and a bed there and clothes hanging from racks as if swiped from a store, and that basically sums up the movie itself—a lot of opulence surrounding a lot of nothing.

The film also announces the return, after about a decade away to focus on a television project and his health, of Nicolas Winding Refn, that idiosyncratic filmmaker who enjoys opulence almost as much as he enjoys provocation. Still, the director has never been quite as empty-headed and incoherent as he is here, with a movie that barely proves itself to be about anything of substance and which might as well end mid-sentence for all the alleged tension he incorporates into the final shot. It’s a choice, offered to the protagonist as the alternative to, well, something, and it’s the “something” that eludes Refn and, most importantly, us.

Neither Refn nor his co-screenwriter Esti Giordani seems particularly interested in making sense of a movie that shifts between storytelling and aesthetic modes but never actually offers any variation in its singular tone of monotonous gloom. The colors are vivid, thanks to cinematography by Magnus Nordenhof Jonck that suggests a camera lens dipped in shades of neon before every sequence, and the score, provided by the legendary Pino Donaggio, is vibrant but, because of the nature of the movie to which it has been attached, rather counterproductive. While we’re dazzled by the sights and sounds of Refn’s movie, we’re also treated to a series of performances as one-note as everything about how the filmmaker has chosen to tell this story.

Elle (Sophie Thatcher) is the protagonist, and the best we can tell is that she’s set to do a sci-fi movie with an eager and overtly bubbly up-and-comer Hunter (Kristine Froseth). It is she whom Elle has invited up to the apartment, just as Dominique (Havana Rose Liu) returns or arrives to find a stranger in her home. The suggestion here is that Elle and Dominique were once friends or at least friendly, until Elle’s father, who is really, actually named Johnny Thunders (Dougray Scott, performing the role with about the conviction required to play a man named—it should be said again—Johnny Thunders), decided to quench his thirst for women half his age by marrying Dominique.

This part of the movie is dedicated to a series of mind games leading up to, forming in the wake of, and following the filming of the movie (given to us in a sequence that doesn’t exactly inspire much confidence in it, except that the in-movie director definitely has something very colorful and with lots of laser-fire in it). If we’re supposed to garner something from those mind games, which intensify with the prospect of a new sexual escapade in the form of a character played by Diego Calva, it’s lost in the atmosphere and empty spectacle of what’s around it. Couple that with the mysterious killings by a figure known as “The Leather Man,” and we’re just piddling around here.

That’s especially true in the concurrent plot thread, following a soldier in the U.S. Army who is looking for his daughter and believes the Leather Man to have kidnapped and done something unthinkable to her. He goes by Private K, played in a series of morose close-ups by Charles Melton, and spends a considerable amount of the movie locked in some sort of box—either literally or within his mind, depending on how one takes this story at any given moment—unable to interfere with any of the eventual carnage by the Leather Man. The two have eerily similar origin stories, but that, apparently, is for us to use our imaginations to embellish.

The movie is occasionally bolstered by its overwhelming sense of style, but that can only get one so far until the actual substance comes through. With its pregnant pauses in dialogue exchanges, its sense of vagueness beyond the basic details of this plot and these characters, substance is lacking here. The proceedings only come to life in a series of brutal brawls between Private K and members of the Yakuza, who are involved for reasons that are neither relevant nor particularly interesting.

The form is the function in Her Private Hell. On the basis of what we see here, then, it makes sense that the movie barely functions.

Rating: *½ (out of ****)