Note: This review was done off of theatrical viewings of the film and as such the review does not feature images or extended granular analysis. Once I am able to get a physical copy of the movie to watch, pause, analyze, and get stills from, the review will be updated to match the site’s standard review format.

Pino Donaggio operatic score immediately graces our ears, evoking the wondrous, mysterious, as we’re greeted with Blade Runner-ensue futurustic cityscapes, towering above the clouds. A large building in the center of the frame, surrounded in neon hues and wisps, is constructed like a person from the chest-up, staring forward. Is this a real building, shaped in this recognizable fashion built in recognition of some other figure? Is it a representation of our capacity to shape our environment, a symbol made maximal?

Then another set of buildings, large towers scattered with neon windows and two large crystalline hands cum claws, shimmering in a haze which obscures the architecture lurking deeper in the background. Another representation of personhood, this time reaching out, grasping towards the indescribable right above it. Yet, the questions persist, accrete towards the increasingly opaque: Where exactly are we observing?

If the traditional establishing shot is meant to ease the viewer in, allow them to establish a tether to the world that the film inhabits, Her Private Hell’s maneuvers act in perverse acceptance of the norm, informing the viewer that this is world that cannot be made precise, a place that exists out in the beyond.

Then, from the fog, a line is thrown – a vantage point for the audience to latch onto. Elle (Sophie Tatcher) a woman who seems to be the only entity capable of persisting through the fog, traverses the unseen cityscape, partially captured in silhouette, as Donaggio’s composition employs fairy tale motifs imbuing this figure with an ethereal transcendence.

With this anchor established, understated as it may be, we follow as she approaches a building who seems to stretch endlessly into the skies , lit by neon pink on both sides. There are two signs in front of the structure lit in neon blues: on the right, the word “Tower” and on the left, the word “Hotel.” Two explicit signifiers in this byzantine world, but their representation still allows interpretative room. Are these words meant to be read separately in that this building is both a hotel and a tower? Are they meant to be read as the “name” of the building, a thought expressed as singular: “Tower Hotel”? And why are we to presume that these words, spare symbols they are, should be read left-to-right instead of right-to-left. Is this a “Tower Hotel” or a “Hotel Tower”? The lexical priority of the nouns implies a different purpose for the building. One can read the “Hotel” as dominating or the “Tower”, but what would the difference in those readings entail?

There are no answers. At least, Elle isn’t here to answer those kinds of questions. As she stares up at the ever-stretching tower, whose phallic construction is certainly more tongue than cheek, it’s apparent there’s something more important on her mind. Her face is captured in close-up, and her background is split between the building’s colors: pink on the left and blue on the right. She’s at a cross-roads even if she doesn’t know it.

She enters the building and the mysteries of the fog give way the golden opulence of the hotel. Elle walks towards the elevator but pauses and returns to make acquaintance with another young woman, Hunter (Kristine Froseth) lounged in a chair in in the lobby.

Hunter starts to fawn over Elle as we gain crumbs of context. Elle is a movie star. She’s here for a project. Hunter is set to act in it.

Elle senses the desperation from the ingenue and offers a comfort, delivered in a slow, detached coolness to not “sell herself.” At first glance, the words seem innocuous, but there’s a sinister underpinning to their implication, one that threatens to become clearer when Hunter indicates that her room is no longer available and her luggage has been consumed by the fog: a young girl in distress, trapped a Hollywood environment that looks nothing like one, surrounded by a mist, who despite being off-screen, now feels increasingly encroaching.

Then, another lifeline, this time to a character inside the film. Elle offers Hunter access to her hotel room, an offer which the latter immediately jumps onto.

The duo enter the elevator and the framing, which places both girls on the sides of the elevators, ensures we’re aware of the haze’s presence, everlasting through the glass windows in the center of the structure and frame.

The camera takes Elle’s point-of-view, lingering on Hunter’s ‘s body in a close tracking. There is potential for desire in the purview of the mist. Hunter smiles.

Then, they arrive.

And Hunter realizes just how immense the presence Elle and her stardom are, absolutely in awe at the space and its luxurious decor.

But Elle could care less about this newfound encounter. Her interest has waned. Her gaze has shifted. This is not what she desires. There are more pressing things on her mind.

Or rather, more pressing persons, one of whom, Dominique (Havana Rose Liu), enters the suite and offers Hunter, who worries about her “relatability” to the fans, advice, delivered with a solemn earnestness, to affirm her singularity as a person. We’re all “stardust”, wholly unique and to ourselves and have a responsibility to recognize that.

But Elle isn’t buying what’s being sold, and the words take on a different feeling when she reveals that Dominque, a contemporary with the other two young women , is in fact Elle’s new step-mother and is married to Johnny Thunders (Dougray Scott), a man who has enticed his daughter back to this location to make a movie under his purview, one which he hopes will tidy over things with his newly affirmed nuclear family. It’s apparent there’s a history, a story, between the freshly signified “mother” and “daughter” which has now been threatened and forced into a fight-or-flight reaction by this attempt at stabilizing the status quo signification.

This is Elle’s hell, one made all the more menacing when her father reveals at a gathering of young starlets, the story of the Leather Man, a father turned supernatural slasher, who lost his own daughter, and in a karmic transformation, is now an entity who hunts lost daughters, serving as a warning to negligent fathers on the consequences of their actions.

It’s after his symbolic integration within the narrative schema, that the Leather Man makes his presence known, brutally eviscerating a young woman with giallo panache , in view of Elle, and disposing of the body in the mist, tossing it from the windows and letting it fall out of view, out of memory.

This act of violence serves as metaphysical segue to the film’s other narrative strand which follows Private K. (Charles Melton), a man who certainly feels in line with Refn’s mythological fetish of super-hero (the “super man” so to speak) starting with Old Eye in Valhalla Rising and last culminating with Lieutenant Chang in Only God Forgives. This is a man, stuck in distinctive location also covered in the same mist, tackling the underworld of trafficking in a desperate attempt to eventually get to Hell and find the Leather Man who he claims as responsible for the disappearance of his daughter.

But just like the signs in front of the hotel, the manner in which the narrative should be read, the tales of Elle and K and the many stories in between, is elusive, offering the viewer a canvas with detritus of what would otherwise be called plot points. Symbols transform, taking on new media and representations depending on point-of-view.

The only true constant is the mist and the presence of Leather Man, both of which operate as antagonist on the one hand and suturing presence on the other. The effect is a matrix of implications. Characters are cyphers, bridges to ideas less than fleshed out persons who would be recognizable in any other space. Beats echo as they reverberate against one another, the plot engendering its own ghost as it attempts to shore against the schism constituted by its wholehearted embrace of the surreal. The conceit of the Leather Man reveals as much: he is a father who punishes other fathers for the sin which led him to become what he became. He is a walking Grandfather paradox, a symbol who becomes entangled in an ever-increasing assemblage of meaning as characters attempt to grasp as his mythology and the film intercuts his violence with perspective in a manner that blurs the line as to where to couch reality.

But the resulting effect is as powerful as it is hermetic. Simple movements, eyes turning, hands reaching, suggest psychic entanglements, projections, realities converging. Sex becomes violence. Murder becomes a shooting star. Space becomes a film. And film becomes a hell. Privacy becomes public as the boundaries between where we start and the Other begin are ripped apart, broken down to their gory stardust.

That Nicolas Winding Refn’s first foray back to the cinematic screen in a decade since The Neon Demon feels like a double down on the auteurs penchants starting with Drive – neon lighting, stoic acting, drained like Bressonian models, slowly paced dialogue, immaculate compositions – also feels his most experimental, seemingly gallivanting between genres – horror, opera, science-fiction, crime, fairy tale – is a balancing act to behold. He’s taken the fetishes which have occupied his work up to the point and stripped the elements to their most impressionistic, an decision reflected most heavily in the film’s aesthetics which obscure all but glimpses of details, hieroglyphics waiting to be interpellated by the audience. Viewers willing to grab onto the swirling images and associations and layer the artifice onto a scaffold in spite of the metaphysical uncertainty, will find meaning leaking, or more accurately bleeding, out between the films poetic, oneiric shifts and reprieves.

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Go to Page 2 for the spoiler discussion and more in-depth analysis.
Go to Page 3 to view this review’s progress report .