A lot of people aren't going to like this one. With record numbers of walk outs in both Cannes and early screenings, director Nicholas Winding Refn's 'Her Private Hell' is not winning audiences' attention. Despite its TikTok/channel surfing constant shift in tone and eye catching visuals, the majority of responses are finding the film to be meandering, substance-less, misogynist, and absurd beyond reckoning.
I'd like to propose a new term in genre description, that being 'Megalopolesque'. As the studio system continues to degrade, and (particularly male) filmmakers who have made well esteemed (as time goes on) 'classic' films try to contend with the way the world works today, how people relate to each other, and gore that fits into the narratives of antiquity, melodrama, and mythology.
Even more specifically, this refers to the boomer girldad who's scared of a lack of personal meaning and masculine value and scared of the loss of his daughter's innocence, and inevitable part of parenthood made more perverse by the father/daughter industrial complex. The use of fabricated and unreal urban environments and stilted unnatural dialogue thrusts the viewer into this uncertain future that these auteurs are already living in.
All this to say, it's an amazing spectacle. Refn has no qualms with admitting the film is fetishistic, violent, and destructive- as is war, as is opera, as is life. Despite the futuristic setting, the Pino Donaggio score creates the pulse of the film, calling to mind nostalgia for the 70s and 80s and a Giallo sensibility.
That, however, is the beauty of it. When attempting to start fresh, as if not only Refn's previous films did not exist, but film entirely, there is a return to form even within the abstraction of reality. The hero's journey is inverted from the typical father figure and masculine hero descending into hell to save his daughter, to the daughter's ascension away from self destruction into an exterior violence.
Refn says it himself, "art is destructive, like war," and "I love violence, I love sex, I love women," women being the symbol of femininity, the symbolic "girl/gun" of film history. The three leads are perfect embodiments of this property, but they aren't purposefully referential, they are more of a reflection of our present reality, one that is completely self aware and self created.
'Her Private Hell' is a melodrama for the TikTok age, a mood piece that escorts us into the future of cinema, whether for better or for worse.