The Death of Style: Why Nicolas Winding Refn’s ‘Her Private Hell’ Is a Cinematic Catastrophe
Editor’s Note: This review was originally published during the 2026 Cannes Film Festival. Neon releases “Her Private Hell” in select theaters on July 24.
“Her Private Hell”? More like our public misery. If, for David Lynch, ideas are like fish in a river—elusive, swimming beneath the surface, waiting to be caught—then for Danish provocateur Nicolas Winding Refn, those same ideas appear to be chunks of waste in an exploded sewage pipe.
His first feature film since the polarizing The Neon Demon a decade ago, and arriving in the wake of the director’s widely publicized 2023 health crisis, Her Private Hell is a neon-drowned, agonizingly languid, and deeply abstruse exercise in ego. It is a film that feels like a slow-motion expiration, forcing the audience to endure a soporific hour and 49 minutes of pretension. With ghoulish, incoherent visuals, a script that feels as though it were coughed up rather than written, and performances that wither under the weight of the filmmaker’s detached nihilism, it stands as one of the most punishing theatrical experiences in recent memory.
The Context: A Decade of Decline
To understand the failure of Her Private Hell, one must look at the trajectory of Refn’s career. Once hailed as a visionary stylist for the razor-sharp tension of Drive (2011), the director has spent the last ten years retreating into a cocoon of neon-soaked abstraction. Following his Cannes triumph with Drive, his output has become increasingly insular, trading narrative cohesion for what he perceives as high-art tableaux.
Her Private Hell feels like a culmination of this descent. It is a film that demands to be taken seriously as a piece of avant-garde cinema, yet it lacks the intellectual or emotional scaffolding to support its own weight. The film arrives with the baggage of a director who has spent a decade retreating from traditional storytelling, and the result is a work that feels disconnected from the very medium it occupies.
Plot Chronology: A Descent into Nonsense
The film is set in an unspecified, liminal metropolis—a city that looks like a bad-dream rendering of the Blade Runner 2049 aesthetic, stripped of its soul and doused in cheap fluorescent light.
The story, if one can call it that, begins with actress Elle (Sophie Thatcher) arriving at the gleaming, cold Tower Hotel. She is there for a meeting with a blonde influencer-type named Hunter (Kristine Froseth). Hunter is ostensibly directing Elle in a new sci-fi project inspired by a swashbuckling comic series titled Candy Floss. However, as the narrative "drifts" into garish imaginings of what this film might look like, it resembles nothing so much as a low-budget, direct-to-video Power Rangers episode, designed by an art director who was seemingly forbidden from using a color palette that wasn’t "toxic neon."
The central obsession of these women is a man named Johnny Thunders (Dougray Scott). He is an oily, unctuous figure, currently married to Elle’s ex-lover, Dominique (Havana Rose Liu). Their dynamic—a hollow, barely scripted psychodrama—plays out like a narcotized version of a Bergman film directed by someone who hates the concept of human emotion.
As these characters languish in their hotel, a mysterious, impenetrable mist begins to ooze through the city streets below. Out of this smog emerges "The Leather Man," a serial killer clad in head-to-toe, zippered fetishwear. His signature move is to force his victims to cry out "daddy!" before he predictably smashes their heads in and rips open their ribcages. It is a sequence of violence so detached and repetitive that it evokes the same audience-loathing, navel-gazing treatment of female image that plagued Andrew Dominik’s Blonde.
Supporting Data: The Technical Collapse
The aesthetic choices in Her Private Hell are, quite frankly, hideous. Cinematographer Magnus Nordenhof Jønck, who previously collaborated with Refn on the Netflix series Copenhagen Cowboy, has crafted a look that is often unwatchable. Characters are either buried in impenetrable shadows or obscured by a constant, aggressive use of fog machines that suggest a production that ran out of lighting budget.
The score, composed by the legendary Pino Donaggio, is a tragedy in itself. It is a relentless, sweeping string arrangement that desperately tries to evoke the tension of Bernard Herrmann’s Vertigo, but instead sounds like a grand, orchestral dirge played over an empty room. The pacing is similarly disastrous. Refn has opted for a "benzodiazepine fugue state" for his characters, where every line of dialogue is hissed stiltedly into the void, spoken with the weight of someone throwing stones down a dry, deep well.
Official Responses and Public Reception
Since its debut at the 2026 Cannes Film Festival, the film has been met with a mixture of confusion and open hostility from critics. Refn, for his part, has remained the quintessential enfant terrible, seemingly relishing the fact that his work alienates both general audiences and longtime fans.
In interviews, Refn has framed the film not as a narrative experience, but as a "somatic event"—an attempt to trigger adrenaline hits similar to the mindless, numbing nature of doomscrolling. However, this artistic strategy has largely backfired. Critics have pointed out that while doomscrolling may be a modern malaise, it is not a compelling foundation for a feature-length film. The cast, including the talented Charles Melton—who appears here in the least stimulating role of his career—are left as "blank spaces," dolls dressed up by a director who no longer seems interested in the humanity of his subjects.
Implications for the Director’s Legacy
The critical failure of Her Private Hell carries significant weight for the future of Refn’s career. For a director who once redefined the action thriller with Drive, the last decade has been a slow erosion of goodwill. The film is so fundamentally broken that it has led to a bizarre, critical "Mandela effect," where viewers are beginning to retroactively question if Drive was ever actually as good as they remembered.
When a director reaches a point where their work is dismissed by virtually every sector of the critical establishment, it raises the question of whether the "auteur" label has become a shield for self-indulgence. Refn is 55 years old, and at this stage in his career, he is no longer challenging conventions; he is merely repeating his own mannerisms.
The film is not "not for everyone"—a common defense for experimental art. It is, in truth, not for anyone. It is a project that exists solely for the gratification of its creator and a small, perverse circle of purist devotees who equate confusion with depth.
Final Verdict
Her Private Hell is a baffling, bewildering, and ultimately vacuous experience. It is a work of pure, unadulterated hubris. As a critic, one is often expected to find the "redeeming qualities" in even the most flawed works of art. In this instance, that task is impossible. There is no subtext here, only a void; no character development, only mannequins; and no vision, only a series of lighting effects.
After witnessing this, it is difficult to imagine a world where I would voluntarily step into another Nicolas Winding Refn film. He has traded his craft for a aesthetic of misery, and in doing so, he has created a film that is as hollow as the lives of the characters he depicts.
Grade: D
“Her Private Hell” premiered at the 2026 Cannes Film Festival. Neon releases the film on July 24.
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