Her Private Hell is a pompous, plotless and improbably triumphant exercise in style over substance. Director Nicolas Winding Refn swishes one genre after another across the screen—slasher, campy SF, mean girl drama, family drama, martial arts—for the purpose of having them freeze and gently shatter when faced with a tableau of thin women posing in fetishized poses and attire. The movie’s a dogmatically insistence on the elevation of look over narrative and desire over climax. And it’s a winner.
To the extent there’s a story somewhere in there amidst all the poses, Her Private Hell is about the conflict between Elle (Sophie Thatcher) and her former (more than?) best friend Dominique (Havana Rose Liu). Dominique has married Elle’s father Johnny Thunders (Dougray Scott) and is now Elle’s stepmother. Elle’s pissed. So Johnny puts together a movie starring Elle and Dominique as Star-Trek-like adventurers in form-fitting suits. He hopes that this will reunite them.
But! They the women in the film are also stalked by a strange mist and the Leatherman, a masked and diamond-gloved slasher who murders wayward daughters. But! The Leatherman in turn is stalked by Private K (Charles Melton), a soldier who’s lost his own daughter and seeks revenge!
But! The truth is that even such a sketchy outline of the incoherent action makes the movie sound a lot more coherent than it is. The story advances only in fits and starts, interrupted by a range of inadequately motivated set pieces: women standing around in fashion show outfits and poses as dressmakers poke them with needles for luck; Elle and Dominique and ambitious new would-be star Hunter (Kristine Froseth) lounging on cushions and barking at each other like wolves; a space laser battle between shipmates amidst odd crystal formations; women on a balcony watching a murder in another high rise; a bitter fight between Soldier K and the yakuza. Trauma, violence, sex—all luxurious, excessive interruptions, which exist not to move the film along but to bring it to a halt.
The most over-the-top moment in the film, and its most telling, is the one actual sex scene in the film. (Spoilers here if for some unaccountable reason you care about spoilers in a film like this.)
Elle’s ravished by her father’s sexy rival Nico (Diego Calva) with her back to a full-length window pane. Hunter, who’s lusted after Nico, sees the two from outside; instead of being jealous, she’s delighted and aroused. But as she watches, the Leatherman sneaks up behind her, and tears her apart, splashing her blood on the window as Elle climaxes. Watching behind them, is Soldier K, who hammers his fists helplessly on walls of a transparent crystal prison. Like you, the viewer, he’s able only to see and watch, not to affect the action.
Refn is creating overlapping layers of looking, some soaked in erotic appreciation, some in violence, some in impotent masochism. De Palma is an obvious influence—and through him perhaps Laura Muley’s influential essay Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema. Mulvey argues that Hollywood films have two modes: one in which the male viewer is identifying with the empowered protagonist who leads and drives the plot, and one in which the male viewer’s arrested by and distracted by the erotic spectacle of women. In Mulvey’s analysis, Hollywood offers viewers the gendered pleasure of moving the world and the gendered pleasure of gazing at it.
Refn’s nameless evil and good daddy’s—the Leatherman and Private K—try, like Mulvey’s stereotypical male viewer, to create a heterosexual narrative plot in which they act upon women, either threatening them or saving them. But the movie insists on foiling these thrusts. It slows down to watch the women in their elaborate outfits. It lingers as women gaze at women with intermittently explicit lesbian desire. It encourages male and female viewers to erotically contemplate the dashing Private K for both male and female viewers, not least in an impressively gratuitous masochistic whipping scene.
The film’s gaze is queer; it’s kinky, it keeps wandering away from the point. Like the evil Yakuza whom Private K blinds with a knife, the look is turned back on itself. And like the matches which various daddies keep striking on odd parts of their body (the cheek, the inside of the mouth), the gaze turned back sparks on a range of unlikely objects and fetishes, desire flaring but immobilized in unexpected positions.
General audiences, and a lot of critics, are likely to find Refn’s approach self-indulgent. But Refn is in part asking viewers to think about what selves they are willing to indulge and why. Is isolated visual pleasure really less virtuous or real than the stories of daddy’s seizing the day and the narrative? When Elle picks up the castrating hatchet at the denouement, do we want her to become the active daddy and start demanding the narrative make her murderer or savior? Or would it be better for her to hack out a different path which, maybe, is no path at all? What pleasure might there be in film—and not just in film—if the father is not always driving it?
Her Private Hell could refer to a range of things in the film, or to nothing. But one possibility is that Elle’s private hell is the movies, which is why Refn is trying to break them for her. I don’t know if he succeeds. But there’s a lot of pleasure to be had in watching the messy, saturated, languidly performative shards he’s left behind.