Take care of your daughters or he will

When it comes to sheer unadulterated cool in cinema no one has been able to touch Nicolas Winding Refn since Only God Forgives (2013, Nicolas Winding Refn). How does one define cool? In the cinematic context? It’s subjective. Although the easiest way to describe it is pretentious. Aesthetically high fashion. Incoherent. Avant garde. Transgressive. Controversial. Self-aware. Fearlessly alternating between absurd shock audacious hilarious grotesque kinky sexy saccharine nihilist innocent naive humane alien artifice. Postmodern. Post cinema.
     Every Man for Himself (1980, Jean-Luc Godard) is the first cool film. Gummo (1997, Harmony Korine) is cool. Lost Highway (1997, David Lynch) is cool. What about Gaspar Noé? Gaspar Noé isn’t cool he’s warm. Too Old to Die Young (2019, #NWR) is the Mount Everest of cool. 
     Why am I so afraid of ordinary? Because if you’re just like everybody else that must mean you’re afraid to think for yourself? Normal is another word fraught with subjective implications. In the cinematic context? Cinema is escape. Escape from what? Reality. I.e. a ticket into an exhibition of artifice. There’s a distinct elastic Germanic Scandinavian resemblance between the style of mannered performances and wooden deadpan bad acting delivery of detached aloof cadence throughout the films of Rainer Werner Fassbinder and by NWR. They get it. Everyone else is conformist Spielbergs.

 

If you think anyone cares to hear anyone else attempt to describe Refn’s work you’re too stupid. Instead what’s up with Her Private Hell (2026, NWR)? It’s not about Elle’s feelings towards Dominique. Is it about Elle’s feelings towards Dominique?
     Have you experienced mistfortune? I am a victim of the mist. It’s not the mist you need to worry about it’s what the mist brings. Mist you. The central narrative motif of Her Private Hell is the mist. The Tragedy of the Leather Man. A father cursed to look for his lost daughter for so long that eventually he forgets. Until the mist makes him remember. If you see him he sees his daughter and will kill anyone to get her. His gloves are embedded with razor sharp diamonds.
     Most people call him the Devil. Johnny Thunders wears the leather jacket. Elle tries on the leather jacket. Private K wears the leather jacket. In the final showdown K fights the Leather Man hand to hand. Elle Only God Forgives the Leather Man’s hands off whereupon K his spacesuit daughter the golden hatchet and the leather jacket all vanish. But Johnny Thunders is nowhere to be found. All that remains are the razor sharp diamond gloves. If Elle were to put them on she would find out what she had lost. What has Elle lost? Does saving K and reuniting him with his lost daughter grant Elle redemption or damnation? Does Elle becoming the devil in her private hell require her overthrowing the money man make any sense to you? Is she an allegory for the art film?
 
Recurring motifs are always a lot of fun. Historically comic books are low culture. Base. Trite. Garbage. Contemporaneously superhero films are too. Hollywood. Commercial. The daughters are Candy Floss means they are the shameful offspring of great art. A tongue in cheek joke in itself that title evokes using the worst thing possible for its intended purpose. This movie is going to be hell. Hollywood slop is hell. It’s not going to save Elle and Dominique’s strained relationship or cure their tensions. Better Elle speeds through hyperspace suicide mission into a planet complete destruction oblivion.
     The four Candy Floss women are also the money man’s daughters. Dominique is the general public. Box office revenue. Elle wallows in her self pity. Basks in her father. When he looks at her all he sees is a gaping maw of need. Because Elle is art. The human condition. And just as Dominique first found little matchstick girl Elle who told her she was an orphan so too does Elle find little matchstick girl Hunter at her door. Hunter who gave away her room and all her luggage lost by the airline because of the mist. Dominique turning on Elle recurs when Elle turns against Hunter. Her Private Hell is about Elle reconciling her ambivalence towards everything that constrains her. And as is customary with Refn this is expressed through sex and violence. And sexual violence. 
 
To catch a ghost you must become a ghost. Private K doesn’t become the Leather Man. Elle becomes Private K. The Private K movie within a movie is the ghost of Hollywood films of the bygone era when they could be artful yet also pulpy. Film noir 1944-1958. As transcendent as Her Private Hell gets is when K all of a sudden is in that room with the bloody yakuza pleading dying wanting the woman who he has in bed it is revealed has just castrated him murdered.
     But it didn’t end in 1958. The Pino Donaggio wall to wall Forties Hollywood emotional underscoring romantic swells bridges noir into Sixties Giallo into Eighties De Palma urban slasher into Twenty-tens and beyond NWR. This movie has the most amazing climax of all time on so many levels. When Elle is getting fucked by Nico and she orgasms as Hunter’s sternum is ripped apart while she yells Daddy on the other side of the curtained glass wall while leather K is trapped helplessly fighting to stop it on the other side of yet another impenetrable glass wall is cinematically glorious rapturous breathtaking colorful visceral passionate decadent dangerous over the top self-assured. How fun is this movie? It's like Disney Giallo.
 
7/25/2026 AMC Parkway Pointe 15
7/27/2026 AMC Phipps Plaza 14
Atlanta, GA