Nicolas Winding Refn’s newest film Her Private Hell is about as divisive as you can get, the sort of movie where no actor in the ensemble ever emotes above a 4 in the vein of Wes Andersen, except when they’re going for melodrama and then they pull a face like they know they’re going a bit overboard and aren’t you in on the joke yet? Aren’t you? Which is to say, it’s a lot like one of the more bizarre and claustrophobically imagistic films of the pandemic–Amanda Kramer’s Please Baby Please, which led to the weird and wonderful saga to nominate Andrea Riseborough for Best Actress back in 2022. If the Alamo’s preshow has anything to say about it, Her Private Hell is a highly stylized adaptation of a grindhouse Italian sexploitation film from six decades ago, working in a genre that was typified by nudity and violence. NWR’s adaptation is conspicuously low budget, filled with a lot of CGI cityscapes and green screens in lieu of free movement of characters throughout a fully-fleshed out world.
The premise of Her Private Hell, if there is one, hinges on a couple of shocking revelations which are more like extended introductions of characters that just sort of hate each other, whose fates are ultimately connected in some roundabout and shoe-horned way to a guy called The Leatherman or “The Devil”. The slasher baddie walks around the streets of Futuristic City which has been subjected to some mysterious fog that doesn’t actually do anything naughty beyond limit vision. It’s not supernatural like John Carpenter or Stephen King’s iterations of fog-related horror stories. Anyway, the Leather Man is kind of loosely connected through a cigarette to a totally different story about an American GI in Tokyo during the Occupation period. I’ve just done a lot of work to connect some pretty far apart dots on this one, and there are a few other things like the protagonist Elle (played by Sophie Thatcher, who has cemented herself as an erotic thriller scream queen of the moment with movies like Heretic and Companion) is filming a sort of Star Trek knock off with her best friend and (sort of spoiler?) step-mom Havana Rose Liu. Liu has had a string of movies this year that have treated her like the indie leading man’s boring but supportive girlfriend (see also, Power Ballad), but this movie actually lets her stretch her legs quite a bit when it isn’t making you scratch your head about why there’s so much leather and so little acting going on.
And don’t get me wrong, I’m as excited as the next guy about a movie getting its freak on–My Own Private Idaho and Funeral Parade of Roses are taking big queer swings and making some choices that are fun. Aoi Yamada, who plays a mute goddess (?) with the power to summon the Leather Man is basically doing an Osamu Ogasawara impression the entire movie. But Her Private Hell has almost nothing to say underneath its flashy, dark aesthetic, its kink-coded dog noises and less-than-subtle birthday cake feeding scenes which hint at and then clumsily assert a sexual relationship between friends that became Oedipal through a betrayal (“except for that one time”). Charles Melton’s previous work on the Netflix movie May December and Riverdale (which set the stage for Euphoria) makes him sort of perfect for this erotic thriller stuff, but he ends up being mostly mute himself, a stiff, expressionless soldier who throws himself into fight scenes with yakuza goons for the sheer pleasure of being the white knight for a bunch of lost girls.
I kept thinking while the movie plodded along with a bunch of cheap-looking glowing crystals that symbolized Hell (?) and a warehouse full of statues and busts that represented the Uniform Party (?) that the last time I watched a movie with a young up and coming actress whose aesthetic choices were so bizarre it pissed someone off it was when Prima and I saw Neon Demon ten years ago and got into a fight about how stupid the movie was that was so bad that I just never bothered to write a review for it. So, you will be not at all surprised to know that the director of that weird and empty shell of a movie is one in the same as Her Private Hell: Mean Girls being Mean to Mean Girls as seen by an older male director.
The Love Witch (2016) also sort of does the same sort of whisper-core, 70s throwback kitsch, but I guess I would argue it does it more effectively because it fully commits to the bit and doesn’t look like someone was trying to compensate for a lack of artistic vision by throwing up their hands and saying “It all takes place in the future in space or something”. There are a couple of electric moments, like the blowout fight between friends at the end of the movie, which features some of the cruelest back-and-forths between friends I’ve seen in awhile, but also the girl who explodes as she cries “Daddy” to no one in particular. All of this feels very campy and fun but you have to wade through so so so much synth muzak to get to it I’m not sure it’s really worth it in the end.
