Nicolas Winding Refn was clinically dead for twenty-five minutes in 2023, on a table, mid-surgery, with two weeks’ warning that this might be how it ended. He has said plainly that the idea for Her Private Hell came when he was dead and came back. I begin there not for the drama but because the origin explains the method, and the method is the story. A director who believed his film career was over returned to features after a decade away and spent his second chance on the least commercial materials available: silence, stillness, a fog-bound artificial city, and a horror plot conducted like opera. Whatever you conclude about the result, nothing in it is an accident of laziness. It is all wagered.
Shooting in order, dreaming out loud
The production facts are the interesting part, so let us have them straight. The film shot for two months in Copenhagen, chronologically, with Refn folding new material into the schedule as it occurred to him. Kristine Froseth describes the mornings: the director arriving while the cast made sandwiches to announce he’d had a dream and that today they would shoot it. Why shoot in order, when every line producer alive will tell you chronology is the most expensive way to schedule a film? Because this particular film is built on presence rather than plot, and chronology is what presence costs. Sophie Thatcher, who usually maps her performances against scenes weeks downstream, says the approach let the cast remain present in a style so specific and so still that any wandering of attention shows in the eyes. Havana Rose Liu goes further and compares the actors’ agency to an open-world game: every choice made on a given day rippled forward into scenes not yet written in stone.
The proof of the method is the barking scene. At dinner during the shoot, Thatcher told Refn that she and her twin communicated by barking before they could speak. He put it in the film. Not as a reference, not softened into dialogue: the three actresses communicate entirely in barks, in a picture that otherwise rations its words like wartime sugar. Thatcher calls it her scariest day on set, certain she could not sell it, and then concedes it worked, that it built the trio’s innate connection. Liu’s reading is the correct one: it is the most distilled way to say these women share a language. A director who shoots chronologically and improvises from dreams is buying exactly this kind of accident. The line item is invisible and the return shows up on screen.
The wager on stillness
Refn has a thesis and states it without embarrassment: in a culture where violence and noise are a swipe away, nothing shocks anymore except silence and stillness, so that is what he will provoke with. He is equally clear about what makes the wager affordable. A film that costs twenty million must earn it back four or five times over, he notes, and he does not have that headache; the freedom to bore or bewilder is purchased at the budget line. This is the governing constraint read honestly: the artifice, the sparse dialogue, the refusal of real locations are not failures of resources but the chosen perimeter. His stated model is opera, scored accordingly by Pino Donaggio, eighty-four years old, in the lush orchestral register he once gave De Palma. Melodrama, a Leatherman stalking a fogged metropolis, three actresses (Thatcher all ice, Froseth’s starlet assigned All About Eve as homework, Liu sliding between best friend and stepmother) filming a Barbarella pastiche while Charles Melton’s GI breaks men in half elsewhere in the city. The two plots are Refn’s own family arithmetic transposed: the soldier descending to retrieve a daughter is the father who came back from the table for his youngest; Elle’s story is the elder daughter growing away.
The fights carry the same signature. The stunt choreography is by Tatsuro Koike with a Japanese stunt team Melton calls gnarly with evident affection, and the actor reports the house rule: Refn doesn’t cheat. A punch is seen whole, beginning to end, no cutaway to a reaction to hide the join. Refn traces the evolution himself, from the documentary chaos of the Pusher films to violence designed as dance from Bronson onward, arriving here at what he calls operatic staging, and he is candid to the point of self-incrimination about its appeal, calling protective violence male pornography. He also, with a grin you can hear in the transcript, reverses the old exploitation trope: this time the performer stripped by the choreography is the man. Casting followed the same logic of surfaces declared openly: choose the face first, because the face is the window to the soul. His summary of the film’s foundations is one of the great honest sentences of this press cycle: Thatcher’s eyes and Melton’s abs.
The room divides, on schedule
Now the objections, which are real and deserve their full weight. The r/movies verdicts have the special cruelty of the disappointed faithful: one thread calls the film a disaster that practically announces it’s too cool to be coherent; the official discussion names it the weakest of Refn’s filmography and prescribes cutting it to ninety minutes. The Film Stage’s Cannes review is harsher still, finding a wafer-thin plot, essentially non-existent characters, and a creeping sense of perfume-advert vapidity, with the era’s worst insult close behind: the worry that it resembles AI slop. These are not strawmen and I will not treat them as such. A method that wagers everything on presence has no net under the scenes that do not land; when the spell breaks, there is no plot to catch you, and a viewer who checks their watch in minute forty is owed nothing for the remaining hour.
But observe what even the prosecution stipulates. The same review concedes Thatcher is captured beautifully and never looks less than great, and calls Donaggio’s score a doozy. And Refn, before a frame screened, defined success as polarization, the exchange of time for an experience you cannot forget, whatever you felt. The premiere at the Grand Théâtre Lumière delivered his metric with comic precision: a seven-minute standing ovation, and walkouts. To call the film incoherent is to grade the opera as a screenplay. The coherent thing is the method, applied without compromise from casting through choreography to the daily schedule itself, and the barking scene, the moment most likely to be mocked, is precisely where the method proves it can mint something no written scene would have dared. Voilà the verdict: as drama, resistible; as executed intention, complete. The ovation ran seven minutes, and the walkouts started before it.
What it took
Two months of chronological photography in Copenhagen, a schedule choice that trades money for presence and forces the whole crew to build the world in story order. Fight choreography by Tatsuro Koike with a stunt team brought from Japan, staged for full-length takes without reaction cutaways. An orchestral score by Pino Donaggio, age 84. A Cannes Out of Competition premiere in May 2026, distribution by Neon, US cinemas July 24 and UK September 25, 2026. No budget has been published; Refn frames it only as small enough to escape the recoupment arithmetic of a twenty-million-dollar picture, which is the condition of the whole experiment. The transferable note for a producer: chronological shooting is a luxury with a measurable artistic yield, and it is only affordable when the budget is scaled to freedom rather than to reach.
I checked a few of the particulars against Phantasmag, Interview Magazine, The Film Stage, the Festival de Cannes editorial desk and the threads on r/movies.