EIFF 2026: Her Private Hell
Nicolas Winding Refn’s latest is as stylised, camp and violent as we've come to expect from this cult filmmaker, but unfortunately it's also deeply boring
Most of Her Private Hell’s more maddening qualities could be defended as the artistic choices of a filmmaker who’s more than happy to needle his audience. Nicolas Winding Refn’s futuristic tale of disaffected divas and vengeful G.I.s is clearly supposed to be hyper-stylised and garish. It’s supposed to be ludicrously campy yet dourly self-serious. It’s supposed to be ambiguous to the point of near incoherence. But it’s surely not meant to be so fucking boring.
Elle (Sophie Thatcher) lives in a high-rise hotel with her sleazy father, Johnny (Dougray Scott), and his harem of young actresses. The hotel is a space that’s pure Refn, both grimily industrial and glamorously chic. Inside, characters are arranged like dolls, creating images that are pretty in a high-end perfume advert sort of way. They speak in strings of pseudo-profound announcements, all delivered in hushed tones with interminably long pauses in between each line.
The dialogue is so grating that it’s a relief when people stop talking and start beating each other up with brass knuckles and switchblades. The other half of the movie follows Private K (Charles Melton), a soldier on a bloody quest to track down his missing daughter. The brief action scenes are executed with Refn’s patented mixture of elegance and brutality, and they’re also the only place where the film properly zeroes in on its sense of humour – delivering sights that are viscerally unpleasant and archly funny at the very same time.
Sadly, the film as a whole is mostly just the first part.