This review may contain spoilers.
I'm a huge Nicolas Winding Refn fan. Drive is one of my favorite movies, so I'm willing to give him a lot more rope than most directors. If he wants to get weird, experiment, or sacrifice conventional storytelling for style, I'm usually on board. I don't care that some of his movies divide critics. I'd much rather watch a filmmaker with a distinct vision take a big swing than another anonymous studio product. This time, though, I think he missed. Her Private Hell feels less like a movie than a two-hour perfume commercial. I saw that comparison floating around online before I watched it, and I honestly thought people were exaggerating. They weren't. That's exactly what it feels like. It's gorgeous. Every frame is meticulously composed. The lighting is beautiful. The production design is incredible. The costumes are striking. The camera is constantly finding something visually interesting to look at. But after nearly two hours, I still couldn't tell you what the movie was actually trying to say. Charles Melton has one of the lead roles, and he certainly looks the part. Refn shoots him the same way he shot Ryan Gosling in Drive: silent, impossibly cool, almost mythic. He spends much of the movie looking intimidating, taking his shirt off, walking through beautifully lit environments, and striking poses that would look incredible in still photographs. It's undeniably stylish, but I never felt like I got to know the character underneath the image. The rest of the cast gets similar treatment. Sophie Thatcher, Havana Rose Liu, Kristine Froseth, and several Japanese actors all look fantastic on screen, but they're often reduced to pieces of Refn's visual design rather than fully realized people. That's ultimately my biggest criticism of the film. I don't mind ambiguity. I don't mind symbolism. I don't even mind a movie refusing to explain itself. What I do mind is spending almost two hours watching beautiful imagery without ever feeling like it adds up to something emotionally satisfying. About forty-five minutes in, I convinced myself I understood what Refn was doing. I thought he was trying to make a live-action anime. The pacing, the heightened performances, the neon-soaked imagery, and the dream logic all felt like they belonged in some slow-burning arthouse anime where atmosphere matters more than plot. I actually liked that idea. I was willing to meet the movie on those terms. Then it just kept going. Eventually it became less like watching a story and more like watching disconnected ideas drift past each other. Scenes happen. Images happen. People move from one gorgeous location to another. There are moments of violence, sexuality, horror, and surrealism, but very little narrative momentum holding everything together. By the end, I genuinely wasn't sure whether certain events were taking place in reality, inside a movie, inside someone's imagination, or somewhere in between. That may very well be intentional, but intentional confusion isn't automatically compelling. I completely understand why this became one of the year's most divisive movies. Critics who connected with its dreamlike style praised it as hypnotic visual art, while others dismissed it as self-indulgent and incoherent. I found myself much closer to the second camp, even though I desperately wanted to be in the first. Ironically, I think the best way to experience Her Private Hell might be through clips. If you chopped this movie into thirty-second segments and scattered them across Instagram or YouTube, I'd probably stop and watch every single one. Almost every individual moment is visually fascinating. It's only when those moments are assembled into a feature-length film that they stop working for me. I admire directors who refuse to compromise their vision, and I hope Refn never becomes a filmmaker who chases mainstream approval. But this is the first time I've walked away from one of his movies feeling like the style completely overwhelmed the substance. I didn't hate it. I was mostly just bored. And that's something I never expected to say about a Nicolas Winding Refn film.