I Walked Out of Nicolas Winding Refn’s ‘HER PRIVATE HELL’

Full disclosure: I walked out of Nicolas Winding Refn’s Her Private Hell around 35 minutes in. Here’s why I still feel compelled to tell you to avoid it. About thirty minutes into the screening, I made a deal with myself: if I checked my watch again before a certain time, I would leave. My hand drifted back toward it well ahead of schedule, and I honored the agreement before Charles Melton even showed up. This is not a conventional review, and I will not assign a grade to a movie I did not finish. It is an honest account of why those opening 35 minutes were so stilted, dreary, and aggressively devoid of entertainment that enduring another hour felt less like keeping an open mind than punishing myself. Maybe it gets better. I doubt it. But I had decided I had already suffered enough.

I should make clear off the bat that I am not allergic to Refn or his particular brand of hostile cinematic experimentation. In fact, quite the opposite. Drive was my favorite movie of its year (I know, hardly a flex). I went to bat for the boldly esoteric, aggressively cinematic Only God Forgives when it was being booed and pilloried, and even my semi-appreciation of The Neon Demon acknowledged that it was “aggravatingly vacuous but undeniably seductive.” I like his weird, inaccessible early shit. I like when he shucks convention. What I could not abide here was how quickly the weirdness curdled into something more stilted than stylized, as though every bad performance, horrible effect, and dreadful dramatic pause existed primarily to prove how little Refn cared whether anyone enjoyed themselves. The movie seems like a fuck you to the whole concept of entertainment itself.

By the point I left, Dougray Scott’s Johnny Thunders was acting so wildly over the top that he seemed to have wandered in from a completely different production. Johnny lives in a high-rise above the city’s neon fog, surrounded by some weird harem of young women because he’s rich or famous or something, and is married to Dominique (Havana Rose Liu), who appears to be roughly a third his age and intentionally close enough to his daughter’s age to make the whole arrangement especially skeevy. Sophie Thatcher plays that dead-inside daughter, an actress moving through the movie in an embalmed haze. In the opening frames of the film, she meets a younger performer, Hunter (Kristine Froseth), waiting in her hotel lobby and welcomes her into her room, beginning a relationship that may eventually become interesting but, within the portion I watched, was rendered with all the electricity of two strangers forced to share a changing room. The entire thing was dry, airless, and absent of entertainment, with the performers vacillating between ostentatious pantomime and absolute emotional vacancy.

The one moment that actually worked for me involved the leather-clad killer making his first appearance in a neon-soaked future metropolis shrouded in I guess some kind of evil fog (because of course a Nicolas Winding Refn city is flooded with neon mist). He tears a woman’s chest open and kicks her through a window in a brief eruption of salacious violence that is brutal, ridiculous, and genuinely fun. For perhaps ten seconds, the heightened effects and lurid artificiality clicked into place, and I finally leaned forward instead of actively dreading the next frame. Then the film cuts to an extended movie-within-a-movie sequence, a dreadful knockoff Star Trek production staged and performed with such intentional DGAF energy that all the air is immediately sucked back out of the theater and I once more felt suffocated.

It is noteworthy how wildly divisive Her Private Hell appears to be. Its supporters – few though they are – seem intensely passionate about its anti-naturalism, artificial performances, and purposeful ugliness. Meanwhile, as my friend and fellow critic Sara Michelle Fetters put it, its detractors “seem to loathe it on a visceral level.” Perhaps if you can forgive actively bad things and pay attention exclusively to the intent behind them, you can find something here to glom onto. I cannot, though I suppose that degree of interpretive charity is an admirable quality. Though one I clearly do not possess.

Refn’s later-career style has flirted with self-parody, but in Her Private Hell, it appeared to topple face-first into it and then remain there, waiting for the audience to, I dunno, applaud the fall? Only God Forgives may have been thin on conventional plot and dialogue, but its violence, visual language, mythology, and moral rot felt purposeful. The Neon Demon was tedious and painfully obvious, yet its images could still seduce and infect the subconscious. Here, I found nothing beneath the affectation worth excavating. It felt like a middle finger to the entire concept of wanting to enjoy movies, a filmmaker rubbing the viewer’s nose in his refusal to provide pleasure, momentum, recognizable human behavior, or a compelling reason to remain in the room.

And here I was, squirming. And not in the productive or perversely pleasurable way a confrontational movie can make you squirm. This was awkward squirm. Secondhand-embarrassment squirm. The kind where the chair itself begins to hurt because watching the movie has somehow made sitting physically unpleasant. Refn clearly does not care what anyone thinks about his work, which is a totally admirable quality when that singularity produces something, you know, singular. Here, I found it just offensive, annoying.

It’s worth repeating that I did not stay for the whole thing. It is technically possible that the surreptitious pleasures of Her Private Hell lingered just beyond my departure time. That the affected performances transformed into something endearingly offputting, that the dreadful effects suddenly made sense and didn’t just seem like the cheapskate last call at the money bar for a director who just doesn’t care any more, that beneath the endless neon fog there was some towering work of cinematic genius. I doubt it. And was so confident in this doubt that I knew that I would be sparing myself an hour or so of punishment by just peacing out. So while I cannot in good faith assign NWF’s latest a letter grade, what I can say is that what I did see ranks among the worst stretches of movie I can remember sitting through. One that tiled more stilted than stylized, more irritating than provocative, and so actively unpleasant that leaving became the only satisfying narrative development available to me. Watching Her Private Hell quickly became my private hell, so I did what any wise man with free will would do: stood up and walked away.

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