‘Her Private Hell’ Review: More Like Our Public Anguish, Nicolas Winding Refn’s Ghastly Thriller Despises Its Audience
Nicolas Winding Refn's latest film, 'Her Private Hell,' has been met with overwhelmingly negative reviews. Critics describe the film as a tedious experience filled with ghoulish visuals and a lack of coherent storytelling. The performances are criticized for being lifeless, contributing to what many consider one of the most miserable viewing experiences in recent years.
- ▪The film is Refn's first feature since 'The Neon Demon' a decade ago.
- ▪Critics have labeled the film as a 'ghastly thriller' that despises its audience.
- ▪The narrative features a serial killer known as The Leather Man, who targets women in a disturbing manner.
2 outlets in our directory ran this story, first to last over 10 hours. All of the coverage we found sits in one bucket: centre. That one-sidedness is itself worth noticing.
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Record
| Original publisher | IndieWire |
| Canonical URL | https://www.indiewire.com/criticism/movies/her-private-hell-review-nicolas-winding-refn-1235194806/ |
| Publication time | Tue, 19 May 2026 12:21:36 +0000 |
| Retrieval time | 2026-05-19T12:34:57.556Z |
| Last seen | 2026-05-19T12:34:57.556Z |
| Headline source | Publisher (no WeSearch rewrite) |
| Excerpt source | publisher body |
| Excerpt method | First ~120 words (~800 chars) of extracted publisher body, fair-use limited. |
| Summary | WeSearch · cerebras-chat (WeSearch summarizer) |
| Summary source text | contentText |
| Citation coverage | Summary is a WeSearch-generated derivative; primary citation is the original publisher URL. |
| Cluster | A8oVXBBFbnpf · 2 stories |
| Cluster logic | Grouped by semantic title/content similarity across sources within a rolling window. Same-publisher template collisions are excluded from coverage comparison. |
| Ranking reason | Story pages are not engagement-ranked. Hub feeds use recency, with optional source-diversified chronological ordering (cap consecutive stories per source). No personalized ranking. |
| Publisher visit | Yes — open original |
| Substitutes article? | No — link-out required for full text |
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| Indexing | May the item be indexed (stored, ranked, made findable)? | Allowed |
| Snippet | May a short excerpt of the publisher's text be shown? | Allowed |
| AI summary | May WeSearch generate its own short summary of the article? | Limited |
| Retrieval / RAG | May the content be exposed for third-party retrieval-augmented generation? | Not asserted |
| Model training | May the content be used to train AI models? | Not asserted |
| Commercial reuse | May the content be reused commercially? | Not permitted |
Basis: Derived from the published RSS/Atom feed. Contact: [email protected]. Reviewed: 2026-07-24.
Opening excerpt (first ~120 words) tap to expand
“Her Private Hell“? More like our public misery. If, for David Lynch, ideas are like fish in a river, then for Danish provocateur Nicolas Winding Refn, those ideas are like chunks of excrement in an exploded sewage pipe. His first feature since “The Neon Demon” 10 years ago and after allegedly dying for 25 minutes in 2023, the neon-drowned, anguishingly languid and abstruse “Her Private Hell” feels like you’re dying (and very, very slowly) for a soporific hour and 49 minutes. With ghoulish visuals, a coughed-up script in which Refn appears to pastiche only himself, and performances that even at their best just die onscreen under the portentous weight of the filmmaker’s dreadfully detached vision, it’s one of the most miserable theatrical viewing experiences in years.
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Excerpt limited to ~120 words for fair-use compliance. The full article is at IndieWire.
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