Her Private Hell directed by Nicolas Winding Refn (USA, 2026)

The Danish born filmmaker Nicolas Winding Refn (NWR) seems to have been adopted as the great white hope of experimental cinema. If you are rash enough to believe some film critics, he can be spoken of in the same breath as luminaries such as Stanley Kubrick and David Lynch.

His breakthrough movie was Drive (2011) for which he picked up the best director prize at Cannes. This quite literally provided a vehicle for Ryan Gosling as a taciturn stuntman by day and mobland driver for hire by night. It is a tightly-pace thriller with a pulsing soundtrack by Clint Martinez and it landed NWR squarely into the mainstream arena; a place which has evidently caused him a measure of discomfort.

The two films he made after this success were Only God Forgives (2013) and The Neon Demon (2016), both of which were high on stylised violence and low on narrative coherence. They sent a clear message to audiences that he was not interested in making a sequel to Drive even though Gosling starred in the former.

Ten years on comes Her Private Hell which takes him even further into serious auteur terrritory. The movie takes place what looks like a cross between a space city or a lavish movie set. It’s hard to tell which since many of the scenes are shrouded in a pink mist. The male characters are like cartoonish characters lifted from a Village People video while the women would not be out of place in a sequel to Barbie. Whether you take all this to be a Sci-Fi homage or as an elaborate satire on plastic people in a plastic world is largely irrelevant. NWR has reached a point in his career where it is useless to look for narrative arcs or to expect any semblance of a storyline. The stilted dialogue serves merely to punctuate the silence rather than to further the plot.

Refn is dyslexic so is barely able to read or write. In 2023, he suffered a near death experience after ‘leaking heart’ condition. He referred to both these facts after yesterday’s preview screening at Modernissimo cinema in Bologna. He also spoke of the film as a kind of opera and this lead him to hire the 86-year-old Italian Pino Donaggio to compose the soundtrack.

NWR loves cinema as a unique cultural experience. He has shown in the past that he has a visual flair and is not afraid to take risks. But this does not mean that he can create a Lynchian universe where a dream/nightmare logic holds sway. Nor does he seem capable of replicating Kubrick’s attention to detail to create a world without a world. And I’m sorry to say that Her Private Hell looks and feels like an elaborate hoax at the audience’s expense. It’s a mess of a movie which, in my view, will be applauded in by those who mistake incoherence for complexity.