Her Private Hell
Her suite occupying the entire top floor of the neon lit grey skyscraper towering above the thick fog which envelops the lower levels of the city beneath, Elle finds a slumbering guest in the softly lit lobby, Hunter an admirer and soon to be co-star in Elle’s new film, her belongings lost by the airline due to the fog and now invited aloft to find something suitable from Elle’s rack of sequins, strappy tops and long skirts.
Daughter of the tempestuous and often absent Johnny Thunder, Elle’s customary companion in the Tower Hotel is Dominique, once one of her her closest friends and now her stepmother with whom she has an understandably difficult relationship, while the mist hides other horrors, all the girls on set having heard the stories of the Leatherman, a serial killer who has haunted the city for decades and has now risen anew.
An apparent companion piece to The Neon Demon, director Nicolas Winding Refn will be equally divisive with Her Private Hell, co-written with Esti Giordani and shot in the same palette of violet and purple by cinematographer Magnus Nordenhof Jønck with a soundtrack by Pino Donaggio which captures the suspense, subtlety and sophistication of Bernard Hermann and John Barry in a story of betrayals, distorted reflections, flickering lights, shattered windows and eerie alien landscapes of crystal.
Starring Companion‘s Sophie Thatcher as Elle, Havana Rose Liu as Dominique, Kristine Froseth as Hunter, Dougray Scott as Johnny, his moods as dangerous as his wardrobe, and Diego Calva as his rival Nico, Charles Melton is the tragic Private K, original investigator of the Leatherman, his child one of the first victims, and Shioli Kutsuna and Aoi Yamada are the ambiguous heralds of the killer who exist within across all times and spaces, even the dazzling film within a film.
The mysterious kitsune nemeses of space heroine Candy Floss, Refn apparently throwing his stylish hat in the ring for the long-gestating remake of Barbarella, her eyes decorated with glittering jewels as her arrowhead spaceship flies through jewelled and turbulent skies, playing like seventies cinema with its fashion shoots, action scenes, horror twists and science fiction sequences Her Private Hell at times seems like a bizarre giallo nightmare melodrama shot in hot pink and blood red.
The threads tangentially connected by a cigarette lighter and the comic read by the detective’s missing daughter more than in any real sense, the persistent fog a dreamlike blur over the whole, Blade Runner painted by Edward Hopper and seen from lofty remove looking down on the white cotton wool of the rainclouds rather than drenched beneath, Elle’s strange quest is as distant from reality as her glamorous role, her Hell private but shared with those who have fallen into the same hole.
Edinburgh International Film Festival continues until Wednesday 19th August
