Nicolas Winding Refn returns with Her Private Hell, an out-of-competition horror thriller set in a liminal futuristic city filled with thick mist. The city is terrorized by a violent serial killer called Leather Man. Elle, an angry and depressed actress, films a high-concept Barbarella-style movie while facing offscreen turmoil. Her strained relationship with her father, a complex psychosexual dynamic with a very young ex-friend turned stepmother, and pressure from an impressionable co-star who constantly takes selfies and performs create escalating tension. Elle also encounters a stoic local soldier searching for his missing daughter. The film blends filming, sex, fighting, and stylized performances with couture costumes and intense makeup.
"Hell'sprotagonist, Elle (Sophie Thatcher), is an angry, depressed actress filming a high-concept, Barbarella-style movie while dealing with all sorts of offscreen drama. She's got a strained relationship with her father (Dougray Scott); a complex psychosexual dynamic with her very young ex-friend turned stepmother (Havana Rose Liu); she's being driven crazy by her impressionable, irrepressible co-star who won't stop taking selfies and gyrating (Kristine Froseth); and she'll ultimately cross paths with a stoic, single-minded local soldier (Charles Melton) who's been brass-knuckling his way across town in search of his missing daughter."
"The resulting feature is enigmatic and lightly campy, strange and hallucinatory, taking place in a liminal futuristic city that's clogged with thick mist and terrorized by a violent serial killer named Leather Man. Hell'sprotagonist, Elle (Sophie Thatcher), is an angry, depressed actress filming a high-concept, Barbarella-style movie while dealing with all sorts of offscreen drama."
"And, of course, there's the whole problem of the serial killer, whom Elle and her band of misfits try to avoid as they film and fuck and fight and bark like dogs in couture costumes and Euphoria-grade eye makeup. Liu and Froseth, who are good friends and recently co-starred onstage in New York's All-Nighter, are particularly fun to watch in the film, draping themselves across various dreamy sets and speaking in slow, elliptical sentences."
"Nicolas Winding Refn is back at Cannes this year with Her Private Hell, an out-of-competition horror thriller about - well, it's hard to say, exactly. Refn hasn't made a feature since 2016's ; as he explained before a screening here, he spent the past ten years primarily working on streaming TV, where he joked that he'd "made a lot of money." Then, he "died for 25 minutes" - he had a "leaky heart" - and when he came back to life, he was newly inspired to make his latest film."
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