Her Private Hell arrives on digital today, 25 August, a month after its 24 July theatrical opening, and can be rented or bought on Prime Video, Apple TV and Fandango at Home. It marks something rare: Nicolas Winding Refn's first feature since The Neon Demon a decade ago. Sophie Thatcher and Charles Melton lead as Elle and Private K, two people searching for missing family whose paths cross inside a metropolis swallowed by a strange, deadly mist.
The most striking credit belongs to Pino Donaggio. The Italian composer wrote the music for Brian De Palma's Carrie and Dressed to Kill and several giallo classics of the 1970s. At 84, and barely active in recent years, Donaggio came back for his first ever collaboration with Refn, and the score plays like a direct line to that lush, string-heavy horror tradition, closer in spirit to golden-age Hollywood suspense scoring than to anything electronic.
Visually, it is unmistakably Refn: neon-soaked frames, a deliberate crawl of a pace, and a genre blend of science fiction, horror and thriller that favors mood over easy answers. It is a film that either mesmerizes or exhausts, and its 38 on Metacritic reads less as a verdict than as a measure of how far apart its viewers land.
For anyone drawn to Refn's earlier work, from Drive to The Neon Demon, this is the same sensibility pushed further into excess, now with a composer whose horror pedigree stretches back fifty years underscoring every frame.
