Cannes’ hot ticket Her Private Hell maddened me with its horny lesbian exploitation

In an auteur-heavy but Hollywood-light edition of Cannes Film Festival this year, one of the movies I was most looking forward to was Nicolas Winding Refn’s Her Private Hell, his first feature film in a decade.

Refn is a darling of the Croisette, winning best director at Cannes in 2011 for his most popular film Drive – which also boosted star Ryan Gosling into the big leagues – before dividing audiences sharply with both 2013’s Only God Forgives and The Neon Demon in 2016.

Her Private Hell is the result of his comeback after dying for 25 minutes three years ago, an experience that he says reinvigorated his movie-making career.

It also received a very promising 12-minute standing ovation at its premiere on Monday night, making it one of the buzziest films so far at the festival. However, I was sorely disappointed.

The film is almost completely style over substance; an accusation levelled at Refn previously, thanks to his love of heavily vibes-based aesthetics. But I’ve never found it as infuriating as here.

However, Her Private Hell also made me uncomfortable with the way its camerawork and barely-there characterisations were sleazy and exploitative at times, indulging in a shot panning slowly down a young woman’s body, as well as the main character straddling her friend-turned stepmother to squeeze her breasts and stuff used knickers in her mouth, and a gratuitously over-the-top orgasm performed by lead actress Sophie Thatcher in the middle of a murder.

Refn famously loves revelling in sex, violence and shocking audiences, but it not only rings hollow in Her Private Hell but also comes across as nothing more than a horny man’s lesbian fantasy daydream, with incestuous and murderous undertones.

It manages to be sexist, bordering on offensive – and just quite embarrassing.

I’m probably not the first critic, and nor will I be the last, to highlight the irony of the line delivered early on by one character, who warns: ‘This movie’s gonna be hell.’

The story is weak, with its characters largely stereotypes – the rebellious daughter with daddy issues, the ‘evil’ stepmother, and the military man who only knows how to communicate with his fists – and in some places it’s frankly just nonsensical.

Thatcher is Elle, an actress living in a five-star hotel in a futuristic metropolis while shooting her latest project, inviting young co-star Hunter (Kritstine Froseth) to bunk with her and igniting unsubtle All About Eve comparisons.

But when stepmother Dominique (Havana Rose Liu) drops by, things start to get… sexually sinister, forcing Elle to also confront her complicated relationship with her father, the extravagantly named Johnny Thunders (Dougray Scott).

He warns her of the Leather Man, a creepy rhinestone-encrusted demon from the underworld stalking the city under the cover of lurking mist, ripping apart lost daughters at the chest – which is the closest this film actually gets to horror.

Meanwhile, a GI named Kay (Charles Melton) roams the streets of postwar Tokyo, hoping to rescue his little girl from the clutches of this hellish demon and getting into many violent fights along the way. This plot strand remains bafflingly separate from the rest of the movie.

Her Private Hell appears to be drawing inspiration from Greek mythology with the underworld and its daddy-daughter issues and overall uneasy family dynamic – but it’s all very surface-level.

Aesthetically, everything looks gorgeous in that 1980s neo-future way that Refn enjoys, realised by production designer Gitte Malling.

But the lack of narrative cohesion means it ends up coming off as a wannabe Blade Runner more than anything else, with its non-specific dystopian setting also permanently in the dark and its poorly defined boundaries between real-life, the underworld and Elle’s film set.

It also feels a lot more like a montage than a movie in places, thanks to its sparse and often silly dialogue, as well as its continuous and deliberately overblown orchestral score from composer Pino Donaggio (although it’s glorious in and of itself).

This and other moments – like the men lighting matches from their stubbled jawlines – suggest Refn did initially have a sense of humour in Her Private Hell. But he largely resists the suggestion of camp melodrama, and the film is all the weaker for it, ending up a bleakly exploitative and limp neon-tinged noir.

You can’t fault the actors for wanting to be in a Refn film, given the boldness of his visuals and how damn cool he can make you look – Gosling in Drive and Mads Mikkelsen’s One-Eye in Valhalla Rising, for example.

They try their hardest with what they have – while Melton most often appears lost but largely bare-chested, Thatcher could be a movie star in the making – but the material is simply too thin and over-the-top.

Her Private Hell premiered at Cannes Film Festival on May 18, and is scheduled for US release on July 24. A UK release is yet to be announced.

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