Her Private Hell Review: Nicolas Winding Refn Returns to Neon-Drenched Nightmares

Nicolas Winding Refn has long occupied a singular corner of modern cinema, one built from seductive surfaces, razor-edged emotion, and images so saturated with neon that they seem to glow from within. After Drive, Only God Forgives, and The Neon Demon, his visual signature became instantly recognizable. With Her Private Hell, Refn returns to feature filmmaking with a work that feels both unmistakably his and even more dreamlike than usual: a hypnotic, fragmented, psychologically loaded descent into horror, fantasy, and inherited trauma.

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Premiering in Cannes’ Special Screenings, Her Private Hell is less a conventional narrative than an immersive cinematic state. Trying to summarize its plot too neatly may actually do the film a disservice. Yes, there is a story here, but Refn treats story as something vaporous—something to be felt, decoded, and half-remembered rather than simply followed from scene to scene.

Sophie Thatcher stars as Elle, an actress who arrives at a cloud-hovering hotel to shoot an extravagant futuristic film. The setting feels untethered from geography: part futuristic metropolis, part haunted dream, part fairy tale. Refn paints the world in glowing artificial colors, with textures that suggest old giallo cinema, sci-fi camp, and feverish psychological horror all at once. Elle, with rhinestones beneath her eyes and a gaze that is never fully at rest, becomes our unstable guide through this unreal space.

What begins as a backstage fantasia of costume fittings, stylized performances, and film-within-a-film absurdity turns suddenly sinister when Elle and her co-star—played with bright, uncanny energy by Kristine Froseth—witness a murder in a nearby skyscraper. A woman is thrown from a window by a dark figure, a killer known in whispered mythology as the Leather Man. According to the lore, he preys on emotionally wounded women, and the only way to stop him is to sever his hands. It’s the kind of lurid premise Refn understands well: half slasher legend, half symbolic nightmare.

This is not a film that asks you to solve it. It asks you to surrender to it.

Beneath the horror trappings, Her Private Hell is steeped in Freudian anxiety, father-daughter conflict, and the psychic wreckage of abandonment. Elle’s father looms over the story as a larger-than-life figure, and the emotional drama that follows plays like a warped fairy tale. Instead of direct confrontation, Elle finds herself entangled with Dominique, played by Havana Rose Liu, a woman tied to her father and positioned somewhere between rival, mirror, and stepmother surrogate. Their scenes together carry some of the film’s strongest tension, because they feel charged by desire, resentment, and mutual recognition all at once.

Charles Melton appears as a mysterious soldier pursuing the Leather Man, a figure who seems to drift in from another movie entirely. That dislocation is intentional. Refn constructs the film like overlapping psychic fragments, where characters are less stable narrative units than emotional frequencies. Some viewers will find that approach intoxicating; others may find it maddening. Either response is understandable.

And that is really the dividing line with Her Private Hell: if you come looking for tight plotting, clean exposition, and satisfying logic, this film will likely frustrate you. But if you respond to mood, image, sound, and subtext—if you enjoy cinema that behaves like a dream or a perfume—then Refn’s approach becomes far more rewarding. He is not interested in realism here. He is interested in sensation.

Visually, the film is often stunning. The frames pulse with pinks, blues, and poisonous reds. Flowers seem to bloom from walls. Rooms feel both luxurious and airless. Refn turns artificiality into atmosphere, and that stylization extends to performance as well. Dialogue is delivered with deliberate theatricality, each line broken into sculpted rhythms that make the film feel suspended between stage performance and trance. This may sound mannered—and it is—but it is also part of the film’s distinct allure.

One of the more intriguing surprises is the film’s musical identity. Rather than leaning fully into synthetic techno textures, Refn reportedly draws from the lush, sinister tradition associated with Pino Donaggio, whose work with Brian De Palma helped define a more classical strain of cinematic erotic dread. That choice gives Her Private Hell a gothic undercurrent that deepens its slasher-fairy-tale mood and helps separate it from some of Refn’s earlier work.

Spoiler-light takeaway: the film’s real conflict is not simply about defeating a killer, but about confronting the emotional inheritance left behind by a destructive father figure.

The film’s erotic charge will likely be one of its most divisive aspects. Refn has never been a subtle filmmaker when it comes to desire, fetish, or power, and Her Private Hell leans fully into that discomfort. Camp, vulgarity, psychoanalysis, and beauty all coexist here in a way that can feel thrilling or excessive depending on your tolerance for Refn’s provocations. At times, the movie seems almost to dare the viewer to reject it. At others, it becomes weirdly moving, especially when its emotional core breaks through the stylized surfaces.

What ultimately makes Her Private Hell compelling is not that it reinvents Refn, but that it refines many of his obsessions into one concentrated hallucination. This is a film about legacy, damage, performance, and survival. It asks what a daughter inherits from a father who failed her, and whether identity can be built from wounds rather than simply scarred by them. For all its abstraction, that question lands with surprising force.

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Final Verdict: Her Private Hell is a visually intoxicating, narratively slippery, emotionally thorny return from Nicolas Winding Refn. It won’t convert viewers who already resist his style, but for those willing to enter its frequency, it offers a darkly beautiful nightmare worth getting lost in.