“A prick of the needle is a sign of success.” This is a line uttered by a seamstress Elle (Sophie Thatcher), the lead character of Nicolas Winding Refn’s Her Private Hell, a short way into the film, which premiered earlier this week at Cannes Film Festival. Set in a cyberpunk, typically neon Winding Refn milieu, Elle is an actress, surrounded by a côterie of the film’s other glamorous characters. Standing up on a pedestal, she is being fitted in a two-piece made from coin-sized silver sequins. The prick, we notice, is intentional. 

This image gets to the bejewelled heart of Her Private Hell, a film about pain and familial separation that is delivered in an envelope of glamour (and a lot of mist). The film follows Elle (Sophie Thatcher), an actress who lives in a monolithic and futuristic hotel as she works on a Barbarella-esque sci-fi film. In her orbit are friend-turned-stepmother Dominique (Havana Rose Liu), up-and-coming star Hunter (Kristine Froseth) and her distant movie mogul father Johnny Thunders. The daddy issues are emphasized in a subplot set in postwar Tokyo  and a GI (played by Charles Melton) looking to find the Leather Man, the movie’s villain who preys on lost daughters. When we see him he’s wearing jewel-studded leather gloves. “I wanted to create a sexy monster,” said Winding Refn at the Cannes press conference. 

This is Winding Refn’s first feature film since 2018’s The Neon Demon, which similarly explored the dangers of beauty (and saw him collaborating with Giorgio Armani on costumes). Thatcher’s Elle, is undeniably a kissing cousin of Elle Fanning’s Jesse, a 16 year-old model who arrives in Hollywood with dreams of modelling. Yet this time the stakes were higher. Winding Refn told journalists that the film was inspired by a near-death experience 3 years ago (a leaking heart left him medically dead for 25 minutes). This encouraged him to double down on his aesthetic interests. “The film became many things for me. You can say there’s everything from horror, to sci-fi, to melodrama, to musical, to camp, to kitsch, to action, to color,” he told Deadline.  

Whilst Her Private Hell’s plot is at times confusing, and it’s tone a little uneven, the mash-up of fashion—which ranges from sci-fi and biker to Japanese yakuza and babydoll–is seamless. They have been created by Jane Marshall Whittaker (she worked with Winding Refn previously on the Pusher films as well as his Netflix show Copenhagen Cowboy) with a lexicon of studded leather, shoulder pads, lace up go-go boots, feathers and a lot of sequins (the vibe is a little Olivier Rousteing’s Balmain). The dark glamour is accentuated with Winding Refn’s signature neon lighting that means frame by frame this could be pulled straight from a fashion campaign. 

Winding Refn gets how to syncopate a character’s wardrobe with their psychology. Arriving home, Elle slowly peels off the crystals that cover her face each evening. At home she becomes increasingly psychologically fragile—a closing in on herself is denoted in the way her fashion starts to match the interiors—a brown jumpsuit blends into the panelling, her flowing skirt floats in the same way as her long, Lynchian curtains. 

Dominique, meanwhile, is kitted out in a suitable attire of vampy evening wear and Hunter, a wannabe star who we meet in the lobby in casual attire (“poor little match girl,” notes Elle), is quickly put into a sequence of silver sequined looks. “Every day, we were in this vortex of a world where you feel like dolls in these playhouses, being objects, being so still. All of our costumes were supposed to be stiff, to embody this dark, shadowy world,” actress Havana Rose Liu told Vulture ahead of the film’s premiere. 

The most wondrous sequence in the film sartorially is one where the women perform in a sci-fi, with Elle steering a spaceship through a psychedelic celestial storm.  The girls wear braletts and panelled leather trousers, with silver appliqué cat eyes and metallic spray-painted faces—the intricacy of this world-building is shown in the comic book Candy Floss, on which this film-within-a-film is based. 

The film’s marketing campaign also has allusions to fashion visuals. The film’s teaser posters—which feature a woman’s disembodied legs on a carpeted floor recall Guy Bourdin’s 1970s campaigns for Charles Jourdan. Making a visual pun around the idea of commodity fetishism. In one of the final sequences—in which Elle and Dominique reach a climax of sorts in their relationship, we approach her sleeping body with a view overlooking the misty metropolis that recall Helmut Newton’s Bergstöm over Paris. 

The menswear isn’t too bad either. Charles Melton’s GI oscillated between uniform and biker attire. Winding Refn had seen him in Riverdale: “one of the latter seasons, which was set in the 50s with his leather jacket and hair, and I was like, that’s the G.I,” the director told press. Melton’s fits are upped only by the film’s Leather Man—when he succumbs at the end, he tears open his chest, and an outpouring of silver and sparkles emerge. Who said crystals couldn’t also have a heart?