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I shall defend NWR with my life.
I'm sure you've seen by now that there are those with taste, and then those who hated Her Private Hell. The film is not trying to be overly smart – it carries on a long tradition of hyperrealist cinema that is to be enjoyed in the senses before you let it capture the mind.
Refn is so deeply misunderstood in his Giallo era, I'm starting to think it's misogyny. Mans swapped Ryan Gosling for Elle Fanning, and everyone's throwing a fit. God forbid a man like putting pretty women in Jewels and telling them to look sad and haunted for 90 minutes. Show some respect! This is what the art form was founded on!
Her Private Hell is full of anger, jealousy and dread. It doesn't dare address anything head-on, but provides a dream to see it all through. Which makes things easier for what comes next.
The Ending
What I'm seeing less of, SPOILERS, is discussions around fatherhood. This is a film about the existential dread of Paternal absence. Leatherface is the ghost of a father determined to return to his daughter and will gore anyone who stands in his way – which sounds like the kind of superhero story a girl might make up when their father is gone, and there's no good reason for it – a stand-in, a shadow of the protective father she wished she had.
Elle is not so disillusioned - rather, she is haunted - she's on a mission to end this ghost. She knows the idea of Leatherface is stalking her, and is on a desperate mission to do away with the ghost. Each person that dies at the hands of Leatherface is or was traumatised by the life and darkness her father had wrought. Private K, and his daughter, a representation of the childhood she wished she had, the protective father she deserved. The gloves, inherited trauma, become hers to bear, and putting them on would simply start the cycle over.
Refn, unironically, presents his most coherent narrative with Her Private Hell – something so coherent that I find my colleagues' confusion baffling. The film is so obvious in its themes that their dismissal of the film leads me to want to call them names.
I guess they'll confront Leatherface soon enough.
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