Neon, Mist and a Man in Leather: Nicolas Winding Refn Returns with Her Private Hell

Ten years after The Neon Demon, Nicolas Winding Refn came back to Cannes with a feature that looks like nothing else on the Croisette this year. Her Private Hell is a fairytale told in neon and fog, set in a city of skyscrapers that never quite emerge from the mist. It is lavish, violent and unapologetically his.

A city swallowed by mist

Sophie Thatcher plays Elle, an actress living high above a metropolis that was built entirely on set. Her father, played by Dougray Scott, has just married Dominique (Havana Rose Liu), Elle’s former best friend, and the jealousy that follows becomes the film’s emotional engine. Around her, the city hides a mythical killer known only as the Leather Man, who has spent centuries searching for a lost daughter.

A second story runs in parallel in Japan. Charles Melton plays Private K, an American soldier convinced that his own daughter is trapped in hell, who fights his way through the Yakuza to reach her. Kristine Froseth completes the cast as Hunter, another actress in Elle’s orbit.

Refn is less interested in plot than in atmosphere. The film moves through loosely connected episodes, with flashbacks, dream sequences and a film within the film, and its colours grow more extreme as the story comes apart.

The look of a signature

The images belong to cinematographer Magnus Nordenhof Jønck, who builds every frame from deep shadow and electric colour. The bigger surprise is the music. In place of the ambient electronica that defined Refn’s work with Cliff Martinez, Her Private Hell has a full orchestral score by Pino Donaggio, the composer long associated with Brian De Palma. The choice pulls the film towards classic Italian genre cinema and gives its excess a romantic, almost operatic sweep.

Refn treats the screen as a place to be inhabited, not explained.

A performance at the centre of the storm

If critics disagreed on the film, they largely agreed on its lead. Thatcher holds the screen with a stillness that suits Refn’s slow, hypnotic rhythm, and several reviews singled out her performance as the strongest reason to see the film. Melton’s action sequences in Japan also drew praise, a reminder of how precisely Refn can stage violence.

The divisions came elsewhere. Some reviewers found the dialogue deliberately flat and the characters thin, and read the result as style placed above substance. Others saw exactly that as the point: a director who has always preferred mood to explanation, now pushing the idea as far as it can go.

Why it matters

Her Private Hell marks Refn’s return to the big screen after a decade spent largely in long-form series such as Too Old to Die Young and Copenhagen Cowboy. Whether audiences call it his boldest film or his most self-indulgent, it confirms something Cannes has always valued: an auteur with a visual language so distinct that a single frame is enough to recognise it.

The film runs 109 minutes and was released in the United States by Neon in July.