HER PRIVATE HELL © byNWR
The making of Her Private Hell, or Nicolas Winding Refn’s resurgence
After a 10-year absence, the mythical director of Drive (Award for Best Director, 2011) and The Neon Demon, Nicolas Winding Refn, is back in Cannes for the fifth time. Her Private Hell, presented Out of Competition, marks a hypnotic and sensory return, originating from a profoundly intimate experience.
Nicolas Winding Refn’s films all possess an acid-laced neon-tinted dream-like aspect. However, Her Private Hell has an arresting origin story that propelled the Danish filmmaker into writing this new feature film. In fact, he visualized the project after a brush with death, following severe heart failure.
“The idea for this project came when I was dead and came back to life”
The monster film was born out of this experience and is composed of several intertwined tales, set in a futuristic metropolis engulfed by a strange fog. A young woman meets an American GI, convinced that his daughter is being held in Hell. As usual, Nicolas Winding Refn mixes the horror thriller genre with science-fiction and a dose of melodrama.
Visually, Her Private Hell is in line with the filmmaker’s previous films such as Only God Forgives, with its saturated neon colors, artificial sets, and hallucinated characters lost in a parallel dimension. This singular pop esthetic also coincides with Jane Schoenbrun’s universe and her film Teenage Sex and Death at Camp Miasma, which opened Un Certain Regard last May 13.
To score his “horrific opera,” Refn called on Italian composer Pino Donaggio, famous for his collaborations with Brian De Palma or Dario Argento, whose sensibilities align with the director’s.
Finally, the cast of this new movie, which the filmmaker considers a resurgence, includes Sophie Thatcher (Heretic, Companion) in the role of Elle. Alongside her stars Charles Melton, recently seen in Todd Haynes’s May December. Havana Rose Liu, Kristine Froseth and Diego Calva round off the bill.
