Her Private Hell

No one ever accused Nicolas Winding Refn of not having an aesthetic. Her Private Hell begins with our heroine Elle (Sophie Thatcher), a beautiful young actress in long red leather, traversing the expansive, tastefully illuminated avenues of what appears to be an otherwise empty city bathed in pink and plum neon and permanently engulfed, to varying degrees, in “the Mist.” She arrives at a towering hotel, imaginatively titled Tower Hotel, where she meets a gap-toothed, even younger beautiful actress named Hunter (Kristine Froseth), who’s just arrived and is so excited to work with Elle. But before doing any work with Elle, Hunter is so excited to take selfies while lounging on every available surface of Tower Hotel’s interior, which, like its exterior, is expansive, tastefully illuminated, and bathed in neon. But hang on, there’s more neon. Also more beautiful women.

Elle is the daughter of Johnny Thunders—alas, not that Johnny Thunders. This Johnny Thunders (Dougray Scott), being male, seems to run things at Tower Hotel; he at least runs the film production in which Elle, Hunter, and several other beautiful, mostly young women are to appear. Thunders says that making a movie is like going to war, but what we glimpse of the movie being made in Her Private Hell, a confectionary all-girl space opera based on a comic book called Candy Floss, feels a lot more like going to sleep. It involves crystals lodged in a moonscape and pretty girls shooting each other with Power Rangers laser pistols. But before production can be inaugurated, the absolutely insufferable Thunders, a character crafted entirely from tired affectations, holds court before his harem-like cast while distorting the planes of his face in the glow-from-below of a table lamp, embodying Refn’s limpest homage to/parody of David Lynch. Thunders talks of the Leather Man, a monster who stalks the underworld—which is also, it seems, this world—in search of his missing daughter, murdering other people’s daughters along the way by tearing open their rib cages as effortlessly as though they were boiled chickens. He comes with the Mist.

Her Private Hell also unfolds in postwar Japan, where a not particularly Kafkaesque American GI named Private K (Charles Melton) goes around exterminating cops and yakuza with near-superheroic fighting abilities. In one memorably turgid scene—and this is a film where pretty much everything takes a long time—K is confronted by a sumo wrestler who slowly takes off his shirt, slowly walks over to a jukebox, slowly puts on a song that will infuse his looming combat with some cinematic cool, and eventually gets one of his eyeballs stabbed. (In case you’re wondering about the other eyeball, just wait.)

Beautiful women, savage men, endless neon. There is the sense that the only thing infusing Her Private Hell with coherence is that everything is staged for the titillation of its director. This is an airless fantasia of myriad dangers, copious violence, and zero stakes, where near stasis is punctuated by highly mannered, vacuous gestures, often made at narcotic velocity, always against a backdrop of exquisitely monolithic visual design—props to production designer Gitte Malling, art director Thomas Karlsen, and cinematographer Magnus Nordenhof Jønck. This is a film that generates a certain admiration and almost zero excitement. It’s challenging to care about almost anything that passes for story here. Which makes Thatcher’s performance that much more remarkable. She’s gifted with conveying inner life, with rendering unspoken conflicts legible. She even did this while playing a robot in Companion. While it may be intended ironically, there is a kind of mantra offered in Her Private Hell—“I am a wholly unique consciousness”—that Thatcher seems to have taken in earnest. However surface-level the project, she’s able to invest it with a glimmer of soul.