Her Private Hell? Absent Parents.

“I started my career trying to capture authenticity, then realised it wouldn’t work, that in a way it doesn’t exist. Then I got interested in unreality. Unreality is really about fairytales. It transcends border, sexuality, age and time. Anything is possible. Fetish, fashion, beauty, sex and pain. It becomes more of an expansion.”

— Nicolas Winding Refn, at the press conference 

Blue and pink neon light diffused in mists, metallic silver silk bedsheets and crimson velvet carpets dimly lit; occasionally a golden shine. The dreamlike world of Blade Runner 2049 (Denis Villeneuve, 2017), inside which sits the infinite hotel of The Shining (Stanley Kubrick, 1980). The juxtaposition of future and past. Elle (Sophie Thatcher) stepping across the lobby towards the music like Jack Torrance stumbling into the ballroom of the past. Everything is bathed in the fog, stretching into infinity, no boundary or end. It’s a circular world of Jorge Luis Borges, a land of mythological happenings.

Underneath the striking aesthetic, Her Private Hell (Nicolas Winding Refn, 2026) is centred around the simple tale of The Leather Man. He searches for his daughter in the underworld, but soon forgets what he is looking for. When the mist returns, he remembers, and he will destroy everyone that is in the way. Elle’s father told this story, likely in an attempt to impress her. He said he would turn the ocean red before he gave up on Elle. But it’s all words and no action. In the 109-minute runtime, this was the last time he appeared in front of his daughter. Only dressed in full leather, the tale is about the father he wishes he was. 

In Japan, Private K (Charles Melton) seems to be another leather man, beating up wrestlers on the way to find his lost daughter. His back muscles and jawline are like those of a mythological statue. Like a god. Did Sophie dream of him after reading Kafka? Private K is the image of the ideal father, a fantasy of her dad searching for her and killing for her. She had made him God, while her real dad Johnny Thunders, lives up to the name of Zeus, sleeping with girls her age, forever absent. 

Dancing amongst the gods, Elle’s sexual advances towards the stepmother are a longing for parental love. Rejection from the mother leads to seeking affirmation from men. Murder at the time of climax. Blood splashing onto the glass as the girl screams for daddy. Death and birth. The Hitchcockian perversion of the murders of beautiful women takes on a different meaning. Private K lurks in the back. Is it the fear of the daughter’s death or the fear of the daughter having sex? 

An elevator at the end of the corridor. Instead of blood pouring out like in The Shining, this time the mist slowly rises. It makes us remember, memories of trauma return. Is the real truth about domestic violence and rape? Does the infinite ladder lead up to heaven or hell? As voiced earlier in the film, “There are many ghosts among us. But what happened to those girls happened in the hands of a man.” Eventually, we all get swallowed up by the mists, and only monsters remain.