Chicago Reader61%
Review: Her Private Hell 77%
By Kyle Logan89%
7/23/2026, 9:43:01 PM
Topics: Movie Review
Keywords: Listings, Reader Recommended
BS Summary: This article contains 22 faulty reasoning types, including Overconfidence Bias, Ambiguity (Equivocation), and Representativeness Heuristic, with Biased Writer Voice as the most egregious example at 67.3% saturation with 231 hits. Analysis detected 871 faulty-reasoning hits from 343 analyzed words, generating a BS Score of 68.3% and a BS Rank of 77% (5,168 of 21,887 articles). This article is worse (more manipulative) than 76.40% of the article peer group.
Nicolas Winding Refn’s return to feature filmmaking after a decade away, two streaming shows, and literally dying due to heart surgery is gloriously and quintessentially late-period Refn.
Her Private Hell is doused in bisexual lighting with regular appearances from starker red hues and a few breaks from the hyperstylization with soft yellow lamplight.
The pacing is hypnotic, allowing the movie to simultaneously function as a tense thriller and a dreamy reverie.
The violence is often stomach-churningly graphic.
The actors are gorgeous; Sophie Thatcher, Havana Rose Liu, and Charles Melton are the three coleads.
The themes are eternal—love, revenge, time—and their exploration is steeped in taboo, as Thatcher and Liu play former lovers who have fallen out since Liu married Thatcher’s father.
And the entire thing is bolstered, if not held together, by a remarkable score.
Here Refn trades in the cool electronic soundscapes and beats of regular collaborator Cliff Martinez for an alternately warm and booming full orchestral score from Pino Donaggio, best known for his work with Brian De Palma.
The most exciting new addition for the filmmaker, though, are the entirely fantastical sets.
Alongside hotel rooms and Grecian statue-filled warehouses, Her Private Hell invites us to a city where buildings are shaped like people, and a seemingly endless place made of giant crystals.
Plot is secondary to all this.
The movie plays with fairy tale, slasher, and pulp archetypes (sometimes going so far as to call them out in dialogue; Liu tells Thatcher, “I’ll always be your evil stepmother”) without binding them to the narratives that birthed them.
The events are inexplicable without being incoherent.
An overarching scary story about a leather-clad killer presaged by mist ties together a contemporary family drama centered around the making of a film and a story of an American soldier seeking his missing daughter in postwar Japan.
Her Private Hell is certainly not an accessible crowd-pleaser, but those already devoted to Refn and proponents of “style is substance” will find much to adore here.
R, 109 min.
Wide release in theaters
Analysis
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