Nicolas Winding Refn’s return to features has a superb score, a fine set of rooms and Kristine Froseth being funny in them, and then it asks us to watch beautiful people say very little, very slowly, for a hundred and ten minutes. We could not.
Nicolas Winding Refn has been away from feature films for a decade, and Her Private Hell is the film he has come back with. He directs, produces, takes the story credit and shares the screenplay with Esti Giordani. It runs 110 minutes, carries an 18 certificate, and is sold on the line “Revenge wears leather”, which is honest about the leather and optimistic about the revenge. The plan is a science-fiction fable of daughters and fathers in a neon city, told half in the waking world and half in something like a dream. The verdict is that it looks and sounds far better than it plays.
Start with what works, because it is real. Pino Donaggio, who scored Carrie for Brian De Palma fifty years ago, has written a full, sweeping, unashamedly romantic orchestra for this, and it carries most of the feeling in the film on its own. Whenever a scene threatens to have nothing in it, the strings arrive and tell us what we ought to be feeling, and for stretches that nearly does the job. Magnus Nordenhof Jønck lights Gitte Malling’s interiors in blocks of pink, red and cold blue, with the actors placed in them like objects on a shelf, and Jane Marshall Whittaker’s costumes are the film’s clearest statement of intent: everyone is dressed to be photographed. As a set of still images it would be hard to fault.
Kristine Froseth is the other reason to be glad we went. Her Hunter is the one performer who has noticed that the film is funny, and she plays every line as if she knows something the camera does not; she got the only laughs in our screening that Refn seems to have wanted. Charles Melton, as Private K, does something quieter and more difficult, holding a face still for minutes at a time and letting us read into it, and he is the only actor who makes the slowness look like a choice rather than an instruction. Sophie Thatcher, who was sharp and alert in Heretic and Companion, is asked here to pose and glare, and she does it well, but posing is not a part.
The trouble is the pace, and it is trouble from the first ten minutes. Refn has the cast deliver dialogue at a speed that would not pass in a stage rehearsal, with long pauses between each line, and Matthew Newman cuts to match, holding shots past the point where anything is happening in them. Somewhere around the hour mark we caught ourselves counting the light sources in a room, which is not what a thriller should have us doing. We were bored, and then we were irritated, and then we were irritated with ourselves, because the images are plainly the work of people who care and we could not make ourselves care back.
The violence, when it comes, is sudden and nasty and has the 18 certificate to itself. It does not build tension so much as interrupt the absence of it. The dialogue is stilted in the way Refn’s dialogue has been stilted since Only God Forgives, but there it sat inside a story; here the story is a set of poses arranged around a grudge, and the lines have nowhere to go. The final stretch takes a turn we will not describe, except to say that it is louder than what precedes it and not much clearer.
Against Refn’s own standard this is the concern. Drive had a man, a car and a job, and the style served them. The Neon Demon had less, but it had a joke about Los Angeles and a real cruelty underneath. Her Private Hell has the lights, the leather, the wide slow shots and the pulsing colour, and it has them because those are the things Refn makes. A style that used to be a decision has become a routine.
The reviews have split badly, with a few critics calling it hypnotic and rather more calling it an ordeal, and we can see both films from where we sat; the hypnotic one lasts about twenty minutes. If you already love this director, see it in a cinema, where Donaggio and the colour can work on you at full size. If you do not, this is not the one to start with, and a hundred and ten minutes will feel like a good deal more.
