“You know, I make films like a pornographer. I shoot what arouses me.” – Nicolas Winding Refn, The Hollywood Reporter, 05/2013
After a decade away from feature filmmaking, Nicolas Winding Refn is back in theaters with “Her Private Hell,” a surreal, defiantly abstract sci-fi nightmare that makes one thing clear: the Copenhagen-born provocateur has no interest in meeting audiences halfway. Love or loathe his movies, indifference is rarely an option.
Led by Sophie Thatcher and Charles Melton, with Havana Rose Liu, Kristine Froseth, and Diego Calva rounding out the ensemble, “Her Private Hell” premiered at Cannes earlier this year before arriving in theaters this weekend via Neon (read our review). The film pushes Refn further into dreams, sensation, sex, violence, and what he has called “post-narrative” cinema, confirming that his self-described “second phase” will not involve retreating toward the streamlined pleasures of “Drive.”
Even as his storytelling has grown more elusive, Refn’s central preoccupations have remained remarkably consistent. His work returns again and again to emasculation, beauty, malice, wounded masculinity, and love and loyalty within violent underworlds. At its best, it creates a singular alchemy of allure and revulsion: hideous, inhuman brutality rendered with immaculate formal control and an almost devotional commitment to style.
Refn is our favorite kind of filmmaker: an uncompromising artist whose failures can be nearly as fascinating as his triumphs. Even his most flawed work still feels personal, provocative, and worthy of argument. With “Her Private Hell” now extending his strange, singular filmography, here are the essential films of Nicolas Winding Refn.
“Pusher” (1996)
Every great stylist begins somewhere. Martin Scorsese’s obsession with street politics officially took root with his coming-of-age breakthrough “Mean Streets.” David Lynch’s transmissions from the other side were present and accounted for with “Eraserhead.” To that end, Nicolas Winding Refn arrived in the world cinema landscape of the mid-90s, if not fully formed, then certainly in the process of becoming himself. His rough-hewn debut “Pusher,” true to its title, is about guys who push (narcotic) product. The lowlifes of “Pusher,” who would almost certainly be romanticized in an American telling of this story, are depicted here as dumb, reactionary losers with hair-trigger tempers. Most of them are drowning in debt and living in a perpetual now, a hamster wheel of endless, cyclical brutality. Kim Bodnia, a presence throughout the early Refn years, stars as Frank, a lantern-jawed heroin dealer who bears the detached affect of a noir antihero, a pose that eventually becomes something of a fixture in the director’s body of work. Frank is good at a few things. Selling heroin, unfortunately, isn’t one of them. Before you can say, “hey, that’s Mads Mikkelsen,” Frank finds himself in hock to some truly unpleasant types, scurrying to rustle up whatever cash he can as the walls close in on him. In what almost feels like a precursor to the preferred narrative engine that drives the films of Josh and Benny Safdie (relentless fuck-up finds himself in a self-destructive downward spiral, annihilating the goodwill of anyone foolish enough to enter his orbit), Refn’s bare-bones debut remains a flawed, if arresting declaration of a major talent. [B]
“Bleeder” (1999)
After the full-on assault of “Pusher,” Refn dug even deeper into the rotten underbelly of 90s-era Copenhagen with “Bleeder,” a fitfully compelling gangster-yarn-as-character-study that recalls nothing less than the “Drive” auteur’s attempt at an “Outsiders”-style boys-gone-bad melodrama. Kim Bodnia and Mads Mikkelsen both return from “Pusher,” this time switching the dynamic they shared in Refn’s explosive debut. In “Bleeder,” Bodnia plays Leo, a lowlife eking out a paltry existence on the margins of the city’s criminal underworld. His wife, Louise (Rikke Louise Andersson), is pregnant, though the prospect of bringing children into a world like the one depicted in “Bleeder” remains a terrifying one. Mikkelsen, meanwhile, plays the only character in Refn’s filmography who it would be safe to assume is a dead-ringer surrogate for the director himself: a soft-spoken Danish cinephile who works in a video store and whose obsession with disreputable X-rated cinema belies a tender heart. The world of “Bleeder” is one where blunt-force viciousness tends to erupt suddenly. Without notice, and while there is admittedly an extremely difficult-to-watch torture scene where Bodnia’s character is threatened with a syringe filled with HIV-infected blood, Refn’s sophomore outing offers a less gruesome, more subdued take than what the director would produce in the mid-to-late aughts. It’s also, to that end, slightly less confident than what we’re used to from this filmmaker: indeed, “Bleeder” is one of the few Refn joints that comes close to feeling like Scorsesean pastiche. Still, the film remains a must-watch for this director’s devotees, as all his trademark fetishes are on full display. [B-]
“Fear X” (2003)
“Fear X” has been burdened with a somewhat stigmatized reputation within the Refn canon. To some, it remains the “Drive” director’s only bad movie: a dour misfire drowning in grad-school allegory, and, inarguably, the film that bankrupted Refn and forced him to retreat to the world of “Pusher” sequels. To others, “Fear X” has been reappraised as a misunderstood masterpiece: a funereal, arresting dirge whose pace could best be described as “netherworld fugue state,” and also a modest independent outlier that is bolstered by an affecting lead turn from none other than John Turturro, plus a screenplay by the legendary Hubert Selby Jr. (“Requiem For a Dream,” “Last Exit to Brooklyn”). “Fear X” unfolds as a spare, unsettling moral inquiry, seeing Refn and Selby questioning just how far off the grid some alienated people can sink. The truth is that “Fear X” really falls somewhere between derision and auteurist reconsideration. Refn’s third feature is nowhere near as messy as its loudest detractors claim it to be; it’s also a muted, downbeat psychodrama that feels as though the still up-and-coming Danish filmmaker is purging the last instincts of standard-issue narrative out of his system before he rebuilds himself and begins anew. The spine-chilling premise is fit for one of Paul Schrader’s Man in a Room pictures. Harry Caine (Turturro) is a lonely man traumatized by the murder of his wife Claire. She was slain at the same mall where he works a lonely security gig. Utilizing layers of opaque nightmare logic, Refn and Selby begin unpacking the nefarious circumstances surrounding Harry’s wife’s death, making this more of the director’s spin on a “Memento”-style potboiler than one of the films that people tend to associate him with in the greater cultural conversation (“Drive” and “Bronson” both come to mind). Still, “Fear X’s” grim charms have endured over time, and this nasty little number remains a must for Refn completists. [B-]
“Pusher II: With Blood On My Hands” (2004)
Tonny, the swaggering hothead played by Mads Mikkelsen in the first “Pusher,” is a dope. The great tragedy of his life is that he remains entirely unaware of this fact. It’s not like he doesn’t get a daily reminder. Pretty much everyone Tonny interacts with, from his domineering, disapproving father to the sex workers who cackle at his inability to get it up mid-coitus, is quite clear that they see him as a living waste of space. Tonny is, however, a fascinating protagonist for an unsparing European crime film: a handsome, charismatic doofus who never once pretends to be the hero, instead embracing his status as a heel whom others enjoy kicking around. “Pusher” was a promising debut, but “With Blood On My Hands” is bigger and better in every way: bolder, scuzzier, and more emotional, a deconstruction of masculine gangster tropes that dismantles the boy’s fantasy hero-worship of so many infantile American action pictures. What’s more is that Refn really starts to hone his signature chops here, even if he hadn’t managed to fully develop the tics that would blossom in his later, more divisive features. “With Blood On My Hands” is the story of a wimp trying to be a tough guy and failing, a motif that also gets a thematic workout in “Only God Forgives.” What’s more is that Mikkelsen lets us see the wounded soul beneath Tonny’s puerile bravado, which makes this second “Pusher” installment a more poignant, even resonant chapter than what we may be used to from the guy who made “Bronson” (more on that crazy movie in a bit). There’s also a measure of hope in “Pusher II’s” unusually open-ended conclusion, which sees Tonny embracing his newfound responsibilities and fleeing the terrible, oppressive city he thought he would never escape. [A-]
“Pusher III: I’m The Angel of Death” (2005)
“Pusher III,” the impossibly bleak, almost body horror-influenced final chapter in Nicolas Refn’s “Pusher” trilogy, is subtitled “I’m the Angel of Death.” And yet, the film might as well be called “Pusher III: And You Thought YOU Were Having A Bad Day!” Indeed, Milo, the over-the-hill Serbian drug kingpin whom we checked in with in “Pusher” and its superior sequel, is having a truly terrible go of things when “Pusher III” begins. He’s newly sober off the hard stuff, though the lingering threat of relapsing is always there. His daughter’s 25th birthday is coming up, and the stress is getting to him. The guys who work for him are cheapskates, thugs, petty morons, and vindictive scumbags. He puts in an order for a large shipment of heroin and receives ecstasy pills instead. What’s a cutthroat entrepreneur to do? The relentless pressure-cooker intensity of “Pusher III” rivals “Uncut Gems” for its sheer, single-minded insistence on wearing down the audience’s nerves (it could also be described as Refn’s “A Serious Man” for how thoroughly it puts its hapless protagonist through the ringer), though it must be said that Zlatko Burić, reprising his role as Milo, brings a world-weary soul to the character that grounds even his most despicable actions in something recognizably human. “Pusher III: I’m The Angel of Death” also pushes Refn’s familiar, heavily decorative violence further than it ever had been pushed before, arguably foreshadowing some of the gorier set pieces in the films that come five to a decade or so down the line. The result is one of the most purely visceral things Refn ever made – searing, obscene, and impossible to turn away from. [A]
