It takes a lot of balls, equal parts courage and an unhealthy dose of misogyny, to rip off the framing of the sex scene from Titanic — skin sensually grasping onto hazy glass — for a slasher set piece… blood spraying at exactly the pleasurable moment you’d expect it. Despite potential eyerolls, which seem welcomed at this point for Nicolas Winding Refn, it’s a shame he doesn’t operate at this level of heightened genre moments for most of the runtime, and safely settles for the lifestyle-curious, emotionally-sterile construction of a Dior commercial. Feels like a mismatch of ambition.

At its most scrutable, Her Private Hell follows a group of muses (Sophie Thatcher, Havana Rose Liu, Kristina Forseth) working under a sleazy Comic-Book movie producer – think of early 2000s superhero cinema like Ultraviolet – in a world lost to time, clouded by a fog that obscures crime until it’s too late. The “crime” has been personified into an entity called The Leather Man, whose giant hands erupting from the ground kick off the movie in a somewhat hasty attempt to trigger your brain into considering this science fiction. In this otherworldly rendition of Hollywood, the actresses are housed in skyscrapers like damsels in “distress,” so, much of the lore – Refn seems in on the comic book joke of it all – is communicated via Private Kay’s storyline in parallel, played imposingly by the charming Charles Melton, who’s looking for The Leather Man to clear his soul of the guilt of his kidnapped daughter.​

The abrasiveness of the connective tissue between the two storylines forces imagery to be a harbinger of plot in a way that’s very of the Refn-oeuvre, but there is an imbalanced mix of money-shots and just “filming shit.” The inelegance of a match-cut — if the pretentiousness wasn’t clear enough — on a lighter being flicked here is indicative of the production’s retreat back into lizard brain, since NWR has stripped us, and the cast and crew, of anything to ground ourselves. In “The Neon Demon” (2016), being situated in L.A.’s modeling industry alone can help imply characterization even in the most sterile movements. But Her Private Hell may as well be set on Mars.

However, this is not necessarily a bug, since moments like a lighter flick that grasp onto a recognizable design constantly breathe new, meta-textual life into Refn’s alienating choices, turning Her Private Hell into a tapestry that rises above an ironic Daddy-issues movie directed by a male director. Especially the climax, which is quite moving, aptly for a movie about characters stuck in arrested development. None of the ideological friction here – of squashing the past and future in a post-Covid era – is brought about in the script, and NWR’s writing collaborator this time around, Esti Giordiani, handles the deconstruction of modern sex appeal with dogmatic snark, which works as well as the corny preaching of Gen Z does in her episode of Apple TV’s Stick — not great, but serviceable.

But look at the coincidental details on the screen. Note how The Leather Man’s giant hands erupting from the ground meet their match visually in the patchy work of the spaceship set for the fake Superhero movie being filmed; like the physical world itself is now a work of enshittification. Or how the skyscrapers, housing actresses in overwhelming luxury that dims the world, are set against green-screen skies of heavy fog. Or how statues outnumber extras in the club scene, where our characters dance to themselves in isolated shots. Both of which feel like COVID-era production quirks, ironically for a movie filmed in 2025, about a world overrun by mass paranoia (whether the fears have been cried into existence or been born out of tragedy). We’ve flattened time not to learn from the past, but rather socially regress into patriarchal customs, even if it’ll be a woman with a wolf cut who’ll save us all. HER PRIVATE HELL. The pictorial analogies via the production design being made here are not ingenious. Still, I’m not willing to make the mistake that I did with eXistenZ — writing off Cronenberg’s attempt to showcase our dissociation with reality with a wildly insubstantial game that I thought no one would play…