Three years ago, Danish auteur Nicolas Winding Refn died for 20 minutes. When returned to the world of the living, the director felt as if he was experiencing everything anew, including a burning desire to make films. This biblical wiping of what came before might be the only explanation for “Her Private Hell,” a film that unspools as a curious allegory for the artificial intelligence era in how it seems constructed by a machine fed to the brim with the work of NWR and able only to spit out a hollow carcass of yesteryear brilliance. 
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Relegated to a late-night out-of-competition slot at the Cannes Film Festival a decade after the Dane brought his Elle Fanning-starring “The Neon Demon” to the main comp slate, “Her Private Hell” sees “Yellowjackets” breakout Sophie Thatcher as Elle Thunders, the daughter of mysterious movie-adjacent maverick Johnny Thunders (Dougray Scott). Set in a CGI-rendered futuristic version of what we imagine Los Angeles to be, the story begins as Elle checks into a hauntingly empty hotel, where Kristine Froseth’s excitable ingénue impatiently awaits. The two are set to star in Thunder’s newest film, a “Barbarella” meets “Flash Gordon” spoof featuring a meager roster of similarly-fashioned young girls plus Elle’s former best friend-turned-stepmother, played by Havana Rose Liu. 

Alas, the already lukewarmly set up production is brought to a screeching halt when glitter-covered serial killer Leather Man begins lurking around the set, threatening to stain the girls’ bubble-gum coloured polyester catsuits with the bright crimson of blood. The killer, who haunted late-night tales told by the pimp-looking Thunders to his Charles Manson-esque harem of hopeful starlets, has also left an indelible mark on the life of Private G, an all-American GI played by Charles Melton in a parallel story set up in the underbelly of the Japanese mafia and chronicling the soldier’s violent quest for his missing daughter. 
It is an odd sensation to be immersed in a world that is clearly NWR’s — sharp red and blue neon hues unmasking the grim reality of a violent demiworld with a mouth gaping open to swallow oblivious darlings — while confronted with an emptiness so shocking as to disorient. The Danish director creates a referential smorgasbord, nodding to great futuristic classics such as “Blade Runner 2049,” “2001: A Space Odyssey,” and the “Star Wars” saga while keeping in line with his fascination for the classic Japanese ghost story and the country’s rich genre tradition that spawned classics such as Masaki Kobayashi’s “Kwaidan” anthology.
Still, despite plucking at the greats to lay the foundation for his long-awaited return to feature filmmaking, NWR keeps a limp pulse on the emotional core of this cautionary tale about parenthood. The result will inevitably draw comparisons to Francis Ford Coppola’s long-gestating epic “Megalopolis,” presented at the same festival two years ago and set in a similar gloss-licked futuristic American metropolis — New York, rather than Los Angeles. While both films look towards a hyper-stylized future to prod at the gnarly machinations of corruption, Coppola’s affair is guided by a pulsating earnestness, an adoration for his story that is tangibly missing from NWR’s half-hearted counterpart.

Perhaps most egregiously, “Her Private Hell” is void of any sliver of the fast-paced fun usually plentifully available atop the Dane’s table. Thatcher strains her pouty lips to a camera unable to capture anything beyond her beauty, listlessly walking through empty halls and corridors as a fragile bird trapped in a mid-budget-Marriott cage. The still-green actress lacks the stamina to hold down a film like this, and the film shows very little effort in understanding what to do with her. Froseth is a considerable step up, with the arguably easier task of playing up the gullible blonde starlet, nailing a handful of comedic deliveries that serve as an oasis, providing brief relief from the stilted sternness of all else. 
Melton stands alone as the film’s saving grace in a performance that makes one wonder what in the world could have gotten the rising star, whose last time in Cannes was in a career-making turn in Todd Haynes’s “May December,” to sign up for such a thing. The “Riverdale” export’s sweat-dripping abs and vein-popping arms illustrate the film’s ghost thesis punchline in an odd tonal turn that aims for a juxtaposition between the tangibility of the physical and the elusiveness of the phantasmagoric, but lands on risible parody and borderline distasteful objectification when seen through the lens of its settings. 
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In this stilted aimlessness, “Her Private Hell” becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy, a torturous journey through derivative questions of desire, loneliness, and love delivered by a Winding Refn in a state of such smugness it makes Harmony Korine seem humble in comparison. It is a great disappointment that we had to wait a decade for the Danish director to return to filmmaking, only to wind up with something that much more resembles the drivel of “Copenhagen Cowboy” than the fresh panache of “Drive.” [D-] 
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Rafa Sales Ross is a Brazilian film journalist, critic and programmer currently living in Scotland. She contributes to Variety, BBC Culture, Sight & Sound among others, and can often be seen writing about Latin American Cinema and explorations of death and desire.