Nicolas Winding Refn Returns from the Brink with ‘Her Private Hell’, His Most Esoteric Feature Yet

At the very start of his filmmaking career, Danish auteur Nicolas Winding Refn was driven by an unyielding dedication to capturing raw, unvarnished reality. When he made his breakout feature Pusher in 1996, the cocaine seen on screen was entirely genuine. For its grittier, highly anticipated sequel, Pusher II, he populated the cast with actual career criminals to lend the underworld drama absolute authenticity. Over the decades, however, the director has swung violently in the opposite direction, abandoning gritty realism for a hyper-stylized, dreamlike aesthetic. His latest cinematic endeavor, Her Private Hell, takes place in a magical, neon-drenched hotel floating high above the clouds in the sky.

The tone of the new film is so profoundly abstract that a hazy, artificial smoke persistently hovers in the background of nearly every frame. The dialogue is recited at a deliberate, agonizingly slow pace that feels more protracted than a courtroom filibuster, while literary touchstones like Hans Christian Andersen are dropped into conversations with a winking, knowing irony. At any given moment, a character could suddenly jolt awake, revealing that the entire cinematic journey was merely a dream—albeit one conjured up by the man who once directed the precision-tooled neon-noir thriller Drive.

Yet, in a manner not entirely dissimilar to the casting choices of Pusher II, Refn populates his ethereal hotel with movie stars playing versions of movie stars. Residing within the surreal confines of the Tower Hotel are Elle, played by Sophie Thatcher; Hunter, played by Kristine Froseth; and Dominique, played by Havana Rose Liu. These characters are the lead actors of a kitschy, fictitious sci-fi B-movie titled Candyfloss. Away from the constraints of their fictional set, they lounge around in costumes just as outlandish as the spaceship-flying counterparts they portray, while casually airing their personal melodramas. Dominique is preparing to marry Elle’s father, a domestic partnership made thoroughly uncomfortable by the palpable erotic tension between the two women. Meanwhile, Hunter literally crawls on all fours across the floor in a desperate bid to win the professional approval of an eccentric filmmaker named Nico, played by Diego Calva, who cheerfully declares to the room, “I love freaky shit.”

Running parallel to this surreal Hollywood satire is a completely separate storyline involving a glove-wearing serial killer known only as the Leatherman. This menacing figure slices through young women with the gruesome flair of a killer who has just escaped from a classic Dario Argento slasher film. Hot on his heels is a haunted former American GI named Private K, portrayed by Charles Melton, who is on a relentless quest to avenge his dead daughter. Along the way, Private K battles the yakuza and somehow manages to physically cross over into the bizarre world of Candyfloss.

Refn has previously alluded to his deep-seated affection for the Italian giallo genre through the lurid, saturated lighting of his polarizing Bangkok-set thriller Only God Forgives. In Her Private Hell, however, he takes things a step further by fully recognizing and visibly relishing the inherent absurdity of the genre’s tropes. When the Leatherman finally slays one of his hapless victims, she does not deliver a monologue or a generic gasp; instead, she screams a single, operatic word into the void: “Daddy!”

When I meet Refn in London on a crisp morning in early September, he wastes no time in explaining the deeply personal catalyst behind Her Private Hell, which stands as easily his most esoteric film to date. In 2023, the director suffered a severe medical emergency involving a leaking heart, leaving him clinically dead for approximately 25 minutes.

“Prior to that, my creative flame had burned out,” Refn reflects candidly. “I didn’t have anything in me. I was at a sense of artistic retirement. To reignite it, they had to literally operate on my heart and bring me back from the dead. Even though it’s traumatic, it’s actually the best experience I’ve ever had, because it gave me a chance to live again. Now the flame is red hot, as if I was 24—but I’m 55. I have the arrogance and curiosity of youth again.”

Refn notes that looking back at his own filmography, Pusher II and its successor Pusher III are objectively “better” films than the original, yet they arguably lack the raw, uncalculated attitude of his debut. “The first time you make something is the best time, because it gives you a sense of childish excitement,” he explains. “Her Private Hell is the first film after being brought back from the other side. That in itself becomes the first time.” When asked what trajectory his career would have taken had he not survived the ordeal, he answers without hesitation: “That’s the thing. It was over. I had nothing to do. I would have ended up doing boring advertisements.”

Her Private Hell marks Refn’s first feature film release since 2016’s glossily macabre The Neon Demon. In the intervening years, however, the filmmaker was far from idle, directing two high-budget, sprawling streaming television series: Amazon’s Too Old to Die Young and Netflix’s Copenhagen Cowboy. Both projects effectively took the elements of his filmmaking style that general audiences had most despised in Only God Forgives—namely, slow-burn storytelling, glacial plotting, and minimal dialogue—and stretched them to patience-testing extremes. While Her Private Hell runs for under two hours, it is paced very much like his television output, encouraging, or perhaps forcing, viewers to luxuriate in the lingering tableaus during extended periods of complete silence.

“I worked with the actors to be very still and precise,” Refn elaborates regarding his approach to the performances. “That gives it a form of artificial presentation, because the world they exist in is all built. It’s a theatrical world, a bit like an opera. They perform their lines like they’re singing in an opera.”

When asked if the disparate scenes within the film could theoretically be watched in any arbitrary order, the director smiles. “Oh, yeah. You can click between the situations as much as you want.” When probed on whether he is genuinely suggesting that fans can effectively remix his movie, he responds with enthusiasm: “I encourage that very much.”

Throughout the picture, the camera unashamedly celebrates the striking physical beauty of its ensemble cast. The female characters, already dressed as though they are perpetually participating in a high-fashion editorial shoot during their downtime, decide to visit a “uniform night” at a sleazy underground club. Meanwhile, Charles Melton is frequently framed topless, glistening sweat visibly running down his chiseled abs, occasionally filmed with his face completely cropped out of the frame.

“It’s a kind of objectification of flesh,” Refn says of these striking visual compositions. “It’s like playing with action dolls, and I can place them around these sets I’ve built like a dollhouse.”

Juxtaposed against the surreal backdrop of the Tower Hotel protruding through an endless sea of clouds, Pino Donaggio’s swooning, operatic strings evoke an unmistakable cinematic vision of the afterlife. This prompts a comparison to Refn’s 2003 psychological thriller Fear X, in which the camera plunges deep inside John Turturro’s fractured headspace and the screen dramatically bleeds red. It is tempting to view Fear X as the work of a young filmmaker tentatively experimenting with the psychological resonance of color, while Her Private Hell represents a mature master fully translating the surreal internal architecture of someone who has stared death in the face.

Refn, however, responds to the comparison with a theatrical, comical frown. “Fear X is a movie I rarely talk about, because I consider it a complete failure on all fronts, both artistically and financially,” he says. “लेकिन I was happy to have failed at that age, because it set my path straight.” After suffering commercial ruin and bankruptcy through the failure of Fear X, Refn pivoted to writing and directing Pusher II and Pusher III with the pragmatic knowledge that they would be guaranteed commercial hits. “After the Pusher universe, I went into unreality with Bronson and moved forward. If it wasn’t for that extreme failure, I wouldn’t be sitting here.” Does he genuinely consider Fear X to be an artistic failure? “Very much. But failure doesn’t mean it’s not interesting.”

The intensely abstract nature of Her Private Hell, he explains, is a deliberate, chaotic mish-mash of conflicting emotions, competing genres, and fractured storylines. “I wanted it to feel like when I was eight years old, clicking channels on a television, and you could travel into an experience, and do the same again, and lose yourself in a kaleidoscope of mini-impulses.”

Ironically, Refn’s recent television series offer the exact opposite viewing experience—more akin to losing the household remote control while frantically wondering what has happened to the television screen’s color settings. When asked why Too Old to Die Young concluded with such a jarringly brief final episode, and whether he simply ran out of production time or financial resources, he laughs off the notion.

“No, no, no. It’s like an epilogue of a book. With Amazon, you don’t run out of money. They print more money. What I made at Amazon, I enjoyed, and there were no restrictions. It was afterwards that they realised what I had made, and they decided to bury it. It was a lot of good work, but Amazon was scared of it.” Did they simply expect a ten-hour television version of Drive? “I don’t know what they wanted. But that’s not for me to say. I do what I do. I’m in the Nic Refn business.”

Refn remains fiercely uncompromising, cut from the exact same cloth as the filmmaker who famously turned down the opportunity to direct the James Bond blockbuster Spectre in order to make Only God Forgives, opting instead to retain complete creative autonomy over his vision. Unsurprisingly, Her Private Hell is not designed to appeal to everyone. During the film’s press screening, one frustrated critic unleashed an explicit, swear-laden rant to the entire room as the end credits rolled.

“It’s not that I enjoy it,” Refn says, unbothered by the inevitable split reactions. “लेकिन polarisation is a great way to penetrate the mind, and plant a seed. Whether you love it or hate it, that’s irrelevant.”

Looking ahead, Refn’s next planned cinematic project is an adaptation of Maniac Cop, a comic-book-inflected genre piece he was initially slated to helm nearly a decade ago. He remains deliberately evasive when asked whether he will direct the project in the vein of his earlier, more conventional thrillers or push even further into the radical abstraction of Her Private Hell. When the conversation turns to video games and his established friendship with auteur game designer Hideo Kojima, Refn admits he is not much of a gamer himself—aside from occasional nostalgic sessions with Donkey Kong and Grand Theft Auto—though he remains endlessly fascinated by the medium. “Harmony Korine is right in the sense that because of the evolution of technology, films have begun to stagnate. Films can be sterile unless you rediscover the medium in a new way.”

Assuming he cannot arrange to die for 25 minutes in between every subsequent film production, how does he plan to continue pushing the boundaries of the medium forward? “It’s staying true to what you want to do. Singularity is still futuristic.”

If he proved with Pusher II and III that he inherently understands how to manufacture guaranteed commercial hits, does he deep down know what contemporary audiences actually want?

“I try not to think like that,” Refn concludes. “I don’t seek validation. I don’t care what other people think. If you do exactly what you want, you will always fly.”

Her Private Hell opens in UK cinemas on September 25.