Her Private Hell review Nicolas Winding Refn's shapeshifting fantasia is a dreamy swirl of strangeness

A film unfolds through a morphing, shapeshifting landscape that moves from a digitally rendered dystopian city into a giant empty hotel filled with mist and fear of a figure called the Leather Man. The story then shifts into a fictional movie that the hotel’s inhabitants may be planning, blending realist premises with hallucination and memory. Further movement takes the narrative into US-occupied postwar Japan, where a haunted GI searches for his daughter. The cast includes quasi-Lynchian characters and oddly nicknamed figures, lit in throbbing neon purples, reds, and blues. The pace remains slow and sepulchral, resembling a zombie that keeps shuffling forward or a sleepwalker with clearer awareness, while violence stays less explicit than earlier work.

"The setting of the film a twist on the 60s pulp shocker of the same title by Norman J Warren morphs and shapeshifts from place to place, with the antilogical procedure of a dream, from a supposedly real outer world to the inner space of hallucination and memory. It starts in a giant, empty hotel (whose colossal Stygian corridors are not unlike those in Refn's Only God Forgives) in the middle of a digitally rendered dystopian city, wreathed in the kind of mist that tends to conceal a serial killer, and people here are frightened of someone called the Leather Man."

"We move to the fictional action of a movie the hotel's inhabitants are (possibly) planning to make, or perhaps to the world of their fears and imaginings, their ideas occasioned by this ostensible realist premise. And then we move to a situation from the past in US-occupied postwar Japan, where a haunted GI is looking for his daughter. This is a story populated by quasi-Lynchian characters and gargoyles with strange nicknames the whole imagined landscape, lit by Refn's throbbingly neon purples, reds and blues, looks like a nightclub in hell."

"And yet it is less violent and explicit than his earlier adventures. The pace is doomy, sepulchral and slow; like Refn's TV series Too Old to Die Young, it moves at the pace of a zombie which has been shot but still keeps on shuffling forward. Or perhaps it is more like that of a sleepwalker who walks and talks slowly, but has a clearer idea of what is happening than those who are, in a more banal sense, awake."

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