Her Private Hell
Well, that was a tragedy.
Her Private Hell follows an actress named Elle, who lives in a futuristic metropolis, isolated in a towering building above everyone else. She meets Hunter, who's waiting for her in an empty lobby before the production of her next film begins. There, they also encounter Elle's stepmother, whom everyone seems obsessed with, and her father, who has the same effect on every woman around him. At some point, her father disappears once again, and the film suddenly shifts to an American soldier in Japan named Private K, wandering through dark alleyways, searching for his daughter while fighting mysterious men and being hunted.
If that description sounds bizarre, that's because it is. I genuinely have no idea how else to explain what I just watched. As a matter of fact, there were only three people in the cinema when the first screening in my city started. Two of them walked out before it ended. The only person who stayed until the credits was me.
Do I regret staying? No. I respect filmmaking too much to walk out of a movie, no matter how bad it is. Am I happy I skipped this one during Cannes and chose something else instead? Absolutely. Because this is an absolute catastrophe.
Trying to figure out what this film is actually about feels like a great way to lose your mind. It exists somewhere between Nicolas Winding Refn's sexual fantasies, conversations about daddy issues, and a neon cacophony of action, thriller, and psychedelic imagery. More than anything, Her Private Hell feels like someone's incredibly specific sexual fantasy that I accidentally walked into — one where I absolutely wasn't supposed to be.
The conversations are completely empty, the pretentiousness is overwhelming, and the film takes itself unbelievably seriously. Meanwhile, as a viewer, you're left asking only one question throughout the entire runtime: why?
The atmosphere is probably the one thing the film genuinely tries to create. It aims for something dreamy, artificial, and deliberately uncomfortable, occasionally reminding you of Blade Runner. The problem is that it simply looks cheap. Honestly, it often resembles something made on a CW television budget rather than a feature film.
The characters endlessly deliver fragments of dialogue into empty space with lifeless expressions, barely interacting with one another, as if they don't understand what movie they're in. And honestly, I can't blame them. Even after watching the finished product, I still couldn't tell you what exactly they were making.
Sophie Thatcher, Kristine Froseth, Havana Rose Liu, and Charles Melton all end up trapped inside this strangely awkward, almost unintentionally funny experience. Their characters seem to be acting out some metaphor about sex and violence that Refn had in his head, but the idea never develops into anything meaningful. It feels like it was thrown into the air and simply left there.
The level of self-importance on display is almost impressive. Maybe this is a ridiculous comparison, but I honestly wouldn't be surprised if something this self-serious had been directed by The Weeknd.
And while the film revolves around an all-consuming evil called Leather Man, who hunts beautiful young women and brutally tears open their chests, I eventually found myself hoping that the same fog announcing his arrival would somehow crawl through the cinema screen and put an end to my own suffering.
2/10
