My quick rating - 4.1/10. Her Private Hell starts with a futuristic-looking cityscape buried under enough fog, I was wondering if the budget went to the cast or a really expensive smoke machine. Elle (Sophie Thatcher) arrives at the Tower hotel, which looks exactly as ominous as a place called the Tower hotel should. There she meets Hunter (Kristine Froseth), before Dominique (Havana Rose Liu), Elle's stepmother, joins them for some truly narcissistic dialogue that somehow manages to tell us almost nothing about the movie they're supposedly there to make.
Naturally, we get the family backstory instead. Elle's father is Johnny Thunders (Dougray Scott), because apparently everyone in this universe needs a name that sounds like it belongs on a progressive rock album.
Then a mysterious mist engulfs the advanced metropolis and unleashes a deadly, elusive entity. And then the strange mist surrounds the highly advanced city and releases a lethal, mysterious creature. In the meantime, an American GI soldier, Private K (Charles Melton), undertakes a terrible quest to save his daughter and comes across a mentally unstable girl looking for her father. Now, if all of this seems exciting, join the club. I thought so, too.
Visually, they absolutely nailed the movie-within-the-movie. The retro high-tech aesthetic has a great old-school sci-fi quality, particularly during the girls' filming scene. I got a dated William Shatner-era Star Trek vibe. The film is directed by Nicolas Winding Refn, so people who have seen films of his know that the film will offer them lots of neon colors and carefully composed shots.
And the visuals really are impressive. Even the initial Private K sequence has an interesting pan-and-scan quality that makes the whole thing feel like some forgotten piece of futuristic VHS trash that somehow received a very expensive makeover.
Unfortunately, around the one-hour mark, I said out loud, "This is boring." That is generally not the reaction you want with roughly 50 minutes left.
The themes are there. Unstable families. Fame as a prison. Fathers and daughters. The crushing emptiness lurking beneath glamour. It would appear that Refn is attempting a "Neon Giallo" horror film, full of metaphorical visual imagery and dream logic. Unfortunately, there simply isn’t enough story to support all that visual poetry.
Things happen. Then other things happen. Characters move through increasingly beautiful images. More things happen.
Eventually, I realized I was watching events rather than a story.
This is a prime example of style over substance. Her Private Hell is an absolute treat in terms of its look, but it never gives any significance to that imagery in terms of plot to get me interested. It's a beautiful nightmare that forgot to give me a reason to have the nightmare.
There are films where the lack of conventional storytelling becomes hypnotic. This isn't one of them. In this case, the dreamlike staging gradually turns into a test of endurance, and what once was mysterious soon becomes wondering if we are ever going to get a story.
A generous 4.1, largely because this thing looks so damn good. For about 110 minutes, I was trapped inside someone else's visual poetry exercise.
Turns out, Her Private Hell was my private hell.
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