Her Private Hell

Grade: F

I have previously described movies like Birdman, The Florida Project, Tár, and I Saw the TV Glow as unique beasts — films that are so unlike anything else that they make conventional movies feel ordinary. Her Private Hell is the opposite kind of unique beast. It is such a disaster that it makes ordinary movies — even bad ones — look like masterpieces.

For 109 achingly interminable minutes, we are up Her Private Hell Creek without a paddle. It starts off looking like a man’s cologne commercial from the 90s merged with a Nintendo Power magazine ad, and gets worse from there. I can only assume a significant portion of the budget went toward the dry ice machine and a collection of strobe lights with different settings. The former effect is “the mist” — something characters are constantly talking about. We’re told that it’s not the mist you have to fear, it’s what it’s doing. The sequences lit by strobe lights of varying speeds are there to camouflage sloppy fight choreography. When we can see what’s going on, it’s laughable. A man’s shirt is removed during a struggle. Are they fighting him or stripping him? Another time, two men’s faces get so close to each other, I thought they were about to kiss, mid-combat.

By then, though, I wouldn’t have found it unusual. It got to the point where literally whatever happened next wouldn’t have surprised me. Every time it starts to establish something resembling a plot, it goes elsewhere into another thing, equally as confounding and undeveloped. It doesn’t just move the goal posts—it migrates us to a different field for a completely new sport. We never get an opportunity to grasp onto any narrative hook.

I’ll attempt to describe a few things that are going on. A bright-eyed, bushy-tailed young woman arrives at a sprawling hotel in a perpetually dark and misty town. It sounds like she’s an aspiring actress who is there to film a movie, acting alongside an idol of hers. The established actress has a father, who has one scene, and then gets to leave the movie. He’s lucky. The screenwriters could have given him any name in the world, but for some reason, he’s called Johnny Thunders. As in, the singer of that great song “You Can’t Put Your Arms Around a Memory.”

Sometimes it sounds like Johnny is leaving to film a movie. Sometimes it looks like there’s a scene within the movie-within-the-movie (the one the women are supposedly filming) taking place, but we never know. There’s a sci-fi sequence involving a spaceship that is brought up once and then abandoned. This is one of the strangest screenplays I’ve ever heard. Some of the dialogue is a true word salad. If the Mystery Science Theater 3000/RiffTrax crew gets their hands on this, would they be able to send it up, or would they be reduced to sitting in stunned silence?

I hope the director called “cut” often, so the actors could let out their laughter and say, “What are we doing?” The cast includes Sophie Thatcher (Companion, Heretic, MaXXXine, The Boogeyman), Charles Melton (Warfare, May December), Havana Rose Liu (Power Ballad, Tuner, Afraid, Bottoms), and Diego Calva (On Swift Horses, Babylon). I list all of these names and titles not as an information dump, but to say that I’d rather see any of them again instead of Her Private Hell.

I have to talk about Leatherman, the serial killer entity. Early on, Mr. “You Can’t Put Your Arms Around a Memory” explains the one way you can kill him. In the so-called climax, Leatherman unsubtly raises his vulnerable area as if to say, “Here you go.” I wish I hadn’t seen Her Private Hell. It’s not the movie you have to fear, it’s what it’s doing. Didn’t Forrest Gump coin the phrase “Her Private Hell happens?”

Grade: F