May 19, 2026 5:10pm PT

‘Her Private Hell’ Review: Nicolas Winding Refn Gets Lost in His Own Private Filmmaking Hell with This David Lynch-on-Bad-Acid Disaster

Sophie Thatcher poses and snarls, and Charles Melton stalks through hell, in a perfume-commercial fever dream that doesn't pretend to cohere.

Owen Gleiberman

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Owen Gleiberman

Chief Film Critic

@OwenGleiberman

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Courtesy of Cannes Film Festival

The first time I saw Nicolas Winding Refn flash the sign of the horns on the red carpet (it was sometime in the 2010s), I thought it was cool. It was the last gesture you expected from a prestige filmmaker. But then Refn not only had a distinctive aesthetic but, it would seem, a rather outré set of values. On the surface, he looked so civilized and Danish, but on the big screen he’d become a punk transgressor who flouted narrative conventions, not to mention the rules of good taste. By the time he brought the loopy slasher revenge opera “Only God Forgives” to Cannes in 2013 (I was there at the premiere showing where it was roundly booed), the fact that he’d made a movie this purple and garish and brazenly solemn in its pop vulgarity became part of his mystique. He dressed nicely, but he had shot past respectability, or even the desire for it. Maybe the devil made him do it.

'Her Private Hell' Review: Nicolas Winding Refn Gets Lost in His Own Private Filmmaking Hell with This David Lynch-on-Bad-Acid Disaster