Nicolas Winding Refn’s new film Her Private Hell opens in UK cinemas on 25 September, but the story of Nicolas Winding Refn Her Private Hell begins not on a soundstage but in a hospital, in 2023, when Refn’s heart gave out and he was, by his own account, dead for approximately 25 minutes.
It is worth sitting with that sentence for a moment. Refn is 55, a filmmaker whose career has moved from the documentary-adjacent rawness of Pusher (where the cocaine onscreen was real and the gang members were actual criminals) to the neon-drenched, dreamlike abstraction of his latest work. The distance between those two poles is considerable. The near-death experience is, at least in his telling, what explains it.
The Heart That Reignited Nicolas Winding Refn Her Private Hell
‘Prior to that, my creative flame had burned out,’ Refn said when speaking with the interviewer in London in early September. ‘I didn’t have anything in me. I was at a sense of artistic retirement. To reignite it, they had to literally operate on my heart and bring me back from the dead.’ He frames the experience not as tragedy but as gift: ‘Even though it’s traumatic, it’s actually the best experience I’ve ever had, because it gave me a chance to live again. Now the flame is red hot, as if I was 24, but I’m 55. I have the arrogance and curiosity of youth again.’
The film that emerged from this is his most esoteric to date. Set in a neon hotel suspended in clouds, Her Private Hell unfolds across several loosely connected storylines. Elle (Sophie Thatcher), Hunter (Kristine Froseth), and Dominique (Havana Rose Liu) are the leads of a kitschy sci-fi production called Candyfloss, staying at the Tower Hotel between shoots, caught in a tangle of erotic tension and personal complication. In a parallel thread, a glove-wearing serial killer called Leatherman is working his way through young women in a register borrowed from the giallo tradition, pursued by a former American GI, Private K (Charles Melton), avenging his dead daughter and, somehow, folding into the world of Candyfloss. Hazy smoke drifts perpetually through the frame. Dialogue arrives at the pace of a church reading. Hans Christian Andersen is invoked.
Refn compares the film’s architecture to an opera, and to channel-surfing as a child. ‘I wanted it to feel like when I was eight years old, clicking channels on a television, and you could travel into an experience, and do the same again, and lose yourself in a kaleidoscope of mini-impulses.’ He goes further: scenes, he says, can be watched in any order. ‘You can click between the situations as much as you want.’ Fans can remix it? ‘I encourage that very much.’
Cannes, Critics, and the Logic of Polarisation
The film’s reception has been, predictably for Refn, divided. At a press screening, one critic unleashed a sweary rant during the end credits. At the other extreme, when Nicolas Winding Refn Her Private Hell screened at Cannes, the Grand Theatre Lumiere audience responded with a 12-minute standing ovation, according to Deadline. It was during that address to the Cannes audience that Refn disclosed he had been dead for 20-plus minutes during heart surgery. The distance between those two responses, a critic swearing at a screen in London, a full house on their feet for twelve minutes on the Croisette, is itself something like a Refn film: extreme, polarised, refusing the middle ground.
‘It’s not that I enjoy it,’ he says of split reactions. ‘But polarisation is a great way to penetrate the mind, and plant a seed. Whether you love it or hate it, that’s irrelevant.’
Her Private Hell is Refn’s first film since The Neon Demon in 2016. In the intervening years he directed two streaming series: Amazon‘s Too Old to Die Young and Netflix‘s Copenhagen Cowboy, both of which took the qualities general audiences had struggled with in Only God Forgives (slow-burn pacing, minimal dialogue) and extended them to patience-testing length. Of the Amazon series, he says the studio ‘buried it’ once they understood what they had commissioned. ‘What I made at Amazon, I enjoyed, and there were no restrictions. It was afterwards that they realised what I had made, and they decided to bury it. Amazon was scared of it.’
His next project is Maniac Cop, a comic-book adaptation he nearly made a decade ago. He is evasive about its direction. What is clear is that the creative mode that produced Her Private Hell (associative, operatic, structured like a child’s channel-hopping) is not a phase he considers finished. ‘Singularity is still futuristic,’ he says. ‘If you do exactly what you want, you will always fly.’
Her Private Hell opens in UK cinemas on 25 September.
