Her Private Hell features a man and woman who encounter a supernatural entity known as the Leatherman—eventually. The film is so artsy that it loses its plot for the majority of the film. It’s also full of sexual and violent content as well as crude language.
High in a skyscraper above the neon-lit misty city of Tokyo, Elle and other actresses film a movie based on a cheesy sci-fi comic book.
There’s tension in the casting. After all, Elle’s father, Johnny Thunders, is married to Elle’s former best friend, Dominique. It’s driven a divide between the two (as having a step-mom the same age as you likely does).
But that whole foggy weather pattern down below the skyscraper is causing tension, too. What is it? Why is it there? Johnny—about to leave the movie for the rest of its run—decides it’s time to explain the reason for the encroaching mist. Legend has it, it’s the result of the Leatherman.
The Leatherman, as the name implies, wears a lot of leather clothing—including diamond-encrusted leather gloves. As the myth goes, he’s a father stuck in the underworld searching for his daughter, and he’s sought her for so long that he’s forgotten why he’s looking. When the mist comes, however, he remembers her, and he searches our world.
Johnny warns the women that, when you see him, he sees you as his daughter. Unfortunately, he’ll kill you when he gets close enough.
The American military vet Private K knows a little something about the Leatherman. Down in the mist, he wanders around Tokyo, animosity still fresh from the recent end of World War II. Like the Leatherman, he, too, is searching for his daughter—kidnapped long ago by the Leatherman himself. But rather than kill every woman who comes his way, he prefers to protect them.
Both Elle and Private K know they’ll encounter the Leatherman one day.
Fortunately, the Leatherman has an Achilles heel.
Er, hand.
Hands.
If you chop off his hands, he dies. I don’t know why. It’s a metaphor or something.
Private K rescues women from abusers. Elle saves someone’s life.
People speculate on whether the Leatherman is a monster, a man or even a god. A woman says that most cultures simply call him the devil—and given that he appears with swirling mist and has glowing, dark red eyes, that’s probably more accurate than most.
Someone explains that the Leatherman has two subservient beings called the Kingmakers, who are shapeshifting foxes taking the form of two women who act as morally neutral guides for the Leatherman. Throughout the film, we meet two Asian seamstresses—one of them speaks like a sort of mystical oracle, while the other, as best as we can describe it, flops around and dances interpretively in every scene. It’s likely these two women are the Kingmakers.
The two women tell Private K that “to catch a ghost, you must become a ghost.” At some point, K perhaps does become a ghost, since for the remainder of the film, he appears in scenes and, apparently trapped behind some sort of unexplained barrier, fails to save someone from death. And at the end of the film, he fades out of existence.
Private K narrates that if he died and went to hell, at least he’d be able to find the Leatherman and kill him.
A woman tells another woman that she’s a “wholly (or holy) unique consciousness,” and she is made of stardust. A woman is told she may choose her fate.
There’s a statue of a naked man with a sword holding up a decapitated head—likely a depiction of David holding Goliath’s head after killing him from 1 Samuel 17:51.
We’re told that Elle’s father enjoys having sex with women who are the same age as his daughter. Notably, the other women acting in the movie all call him “daddy.” His current interest is Dominique, who also just so happens to be Elle’s once-best friend and potential previous lover. Dominique admits she’s only having sex with Elle’s dad so she can be closer to Elle.
Later, Elle passionately kisses Dominique, but Dominique tells her that she’s not in the mood to go further. In retaliation, Elle decides to have sex with a man, and while we don’t see nudity, there’s a lengthy audible sex scene. Afterwards, Elle cleans herself using her underwear, and she decides to choke a sleeping Dominique by putting the used garments into the woman’s mouth. (She’s pushed off eventually.)
Part of the movie takes place in a room full of marble statues depicting naked men and women, their sculpted privates visible.
Elle claims that a woman is “begging to be touched.” Dominique mentions cheating on Elle’s father with another man and describes how the man, um, tastes.
Many women wear dresses, bras or lingerie that reveals much of their bodies or breasts. Some men are shirtless. A carving on a cigarette lighter depicts a naked woman with her breasts visible.
There’s a reference to a “lesbian performance.”
Elle and another actress, Hunter, watch the Leatherman murder a woman in another building. He slams her head against a window and tears open her chest from behind. (This is something of his signature move, as we’ll see). Then, after spraying the skyscraper window with blood, the Leatherman breaks it and throws her body out the window. (Elle and Hunter, apparently unbothered, go to shoot a movie scene after this.)
While spying through a window on a woman having sex, Hunter is attacked by the Leatherman, and the monster tears open her chest so that blood splatters against the window. Elle finds another woman murdered by the Leatherman, too. She hears the woman thumped against a door offscreen and then sees the victim’s body broken on the ground.
Private K beats and mutilates more than a dozen men. Some were simply beaten unconscious; others receive mortal wounds. A man gets pinned to a table by a knife through his hand; another man gets stabbed through the hand and into his eye (his punctured eye falls on the floor). A third has his throat cut, and others get stabbed multiple times in the stomach. Private K stomps a few men on the ground, and he beats a man with his fists until the man’s skull breaks.
Private K rescues a chained woman in lingerie and another woman who’d been on a bed about to be raped. The woman on the bed used a blade to cut off her attacker’s genitals: We see him naked and bloody on the ground, his hand covering where his privates would be. Private K ends the man’s life.
Yakuza thugs hurt women who were seemingly forced into prostitution. We see one woman thrown against a window. Elle straddles a sleeping woman and gropes her without her consent.
Private K is whipped with a belt until his exposed back is bloody, and he’s attacked by a group of men, though he fights them off (or maybe he dies and turns into a ghost—as stated before, it’s not fully clear). Regardless, the room ends up very bloody. Someone talks about a dead baby someone purchased. Two women threaten each other with weapons. Someone’s hands get cut off.
We hear the f-word around 25 times, including one use preceded by “mother.” The s-word is used twice. We hear “b–ch” and “h—,” too. Jesus’ name is used in vain once.
People smoke cigarettes and drink liquor. There’s a reference to Elle getting inebriated and vomiting later.
A woman sucks on a bloody needle after it was used to prick a woman.
It’s not often that a movie makes me look at Moonfall and think: perhaps I treated you too harshly.
For all its faults, ridiculous moments and unintentional comedy, at least Moonfall knew how to tells its crazy story—artistic flare need not apply.
That’s really the issue artsy films like Her Private Hell can face: sometimes, they succeed conveying their deeper meanings and symbolism. Other times, they just end up like the visual equivalent of a 6-year-old trying to tell you about the abstract dream they had last night for two hours straight.
The fact I make that duality in the first place should tell you into which side of it Her Private Hell fell.
Simply put, the movie is too focused on artistry for its own good, leaving most plot elements, drowned in their neon-soaked backdrops, almost entirely up to audience interpretation.
That can certainly work when you’ve built a solid foundation for the rest of the story. But if not, you just leave your audience confused or bored. Watching this movie is something akin to being given a complex board game that didn’t come with a rulebook and trying to decipher how to play by the strange pieces inside the box—and then some snob comes along and tells you that “you just don’t get it.”
And many of those pieces are, well, unsavory. Sexual and violent content stain the screen, and crude language is frequent, too. Unsurprising, since Director Nicolas Winding Refn explained in an interview that “the more you can combine sex and violence in one, the more effective it is” and that each of the movie’s characters as “representative of a certain fetish.”
For the sake of being charitable, I’ll give the movie this: Pino Donaggio’s soundtrack for the movie is lovely.
But otherwise, I get the feeling most audiences will be wishing Her Private Hell could have stayed, well, private.
Kennedy Unthank studied journalism at the University of Missouri. He knew he wanted to write for a living when he won a contest for “best fantasy story” while in the 4th grade. What he didn’t know at the time, however, was that he was the only person to submit a story. Regardless, the seed was planted. Kennedy collects and plays board games in his free time, and he loves to talk about biblical apologetics. He’s also an avid cook. He thinks the ending of Lost “wasn’t that bad.”
