HER PRIVATE HELL

*

Directed by Nicolas Winding Refn.

Starring Sophie Thatcher, Charles Melton, Havana Rose Liu.

Horror/Science-Fiction, Denmark, 110 Minutes, Certificate 18.

Released in Cinemas in the UK on September 25th by Mubi.

Nicolas Winding Refn makes a long awaited return to the cinema screens a full decade after THE NEON DEMON. In the years since, he has hardly been resting on his laurels, what with working on two television series, firstly the lethargically paced TOO OLD TO DIE YOUNG for Amazon in 2020 and the poorly received 2022 psychic crime thriller COPENHAGEN COWBOY for Netflix. During this time he also struggled with a serious heart issue where he supposedly died for twenty-five minutes on the operating table, then springing back with a renewed passion for sharing his vision on the cinema screen. Sadly that vision seems to be skewed by a seemingly perverse instinct for drawing out his increasingly stilted pacing, arch artifice, zero characterisation and atom thin plotting to beyond breaking point, resulting in one of the most vapid and boring films of the year.

Taking on the role of his muse this time is Sophie Thatcher, playing Elle, an actress and star of a kitschy science-fiction movie. Living in a spacious, glamorous high-rise apartment in a neon-lit, fog drenched and eerily deserted futuristic metropolis, Elle plays host to her co-stars: the air headed Hunter (Kristine Froseth) and her young step-mother Dominique (Havana Rose Liu). Jealousy threatens to raise its head in regards to both of these women, especially when vying for the affection of her punk rocker father Johnny Thunders (Dougray Scott) as well as an unspoken attraction between herself and her stepmother. At the same time, a leather clad killer imaginatively named Leather Man, is stalking women while Private K (Charles Melton), an American GI roams the streets dispensing justice to the yakuza while looking for his own missing daughter.

That plot, if you can call it that, sounds enticing enough, not just for fans of Refn but cult cinema enthusiasts in general. This however feels like the longest perfume commercial ever made. It looks and sounds pretty enough with its colourful, artificial vistas where glamorous figures pose and move slowly across the screen to a bombastic Pino Donnagio score, but where something like that is somewhat acceptable and distracting enough for a minute or two during an advert break can feel more like your own private Hell when stretched out to a near two hour running time on a larger screen. What should be exciting and outrageous and exciting is instead dull, lifeless and seemingly never ending. Recently at Cannes, Refn professed admiration and enthusiasm for AI in filmmaking. While dispiriting, especially from a filmmaker who once gave us such singular and immediate cinematic experiences as the PUSHER trilogy, ONLY GOD FORGIVES and VALHALLA RISING, it hardly seems surprising now. One sequence here involving the science-fiction movie that Elle stars in looks and feels exactly like the AI slop that plagues so many social media feeds while the nods to Argento with the Leather Man sub-plot fail to elicit any kind of response in the viewer whatsoever, only coming across as cinematically empty in every single sense.

God knows how you can make a sci-fi, giallo movie with sadistic yakuza gangsters, fetish tinged serial killers and jealous lesbians as boring as this but somehow, Refn has discovered the secret formula here. It just makes the fact that his next film, the long promised MANIAC COP remake, once an enticing proposition, could just be the next chapter in his cinematic journey of self-indulgent wank. What could have been perverse and fun here is nothing more than boring and a crushing long-winded disappointment that promises so much and delivers absolutely nothing.

Iain MacLeod