By Maria Agnesa Puscasu, Cannes Film Festival 2026
Bluebeard was one of the first stories I ever read on my own as a child, in my beautiful volume of Grimm Brothers’ fairytales. It’s the story of a rich man who secretly murders six wives and marries a seventh young woman. She discovers his secret, and her brothers manage to kill him. It’s very graphic, and I can still see the images in my mind thirty years later. I believe Her Private Hell will stay with me in the same way. It reminded me of Bluebeard.
I was so intrigued by the film that I went to the press conference following its Cannes premiere. Nicolas Winding Refn arrived with his actors and his master composer.
“Yes, it is a fairytale,” Refn said, describing how the film weaves together three dreams or ideas he wanted to explore:
– A girl who arrives in a city that doesn’t exist.
– A man who wants to go to hell and back.
– A sexy monster.
The girl
Elle, a young woman, arrives in a city swallowed by dense fog. She is there to shoot a film with her former best friend, now her stepmother. She is furious with both her and her father for marrying. When visiting them, her father tells a haunting story about the fog surrounding the city: a man searching for his lost daughter, killing every woman who turns out not to be her. He only comes when the fog descends. He has many names, but some call him simply The Devil.
The monster does indeed come to haunt the clouded city, where we never see any light. He murders women and eventually chases Elle. She manages to cut off his hands and is given the chance to replace him, receiving his gloves from the dark angels who served him.
The man
There is a man who lost his daughter to the monster and has turned into a vigilante, saving women from their abusers while hunting the creature in hopes of finding his child. He ends up fighting the beast, and after Elle defeats it, he is granted permission to rescue his daughter from hell.
The monster
Dressed entirely in black leather, wearing gloves encrusted with diamonds, he shows no mercy and hears no cries. He is almost a glamorous robot programmed to kill.
All these characters are bound together by the master Pino Donaggio. While working on the film, Refn remembers listening to his music constantly, unsure whether the composer was even still alive. Sitting beside him at the press conference, they both laugh. Since Refn envisioned the film as an opera, he googled him, discovered he was alive, and asked him to compose the score.
He wanted an opera not only musically but visually, too. The décor is minimal; we see only details, accents rising from the fog—like the images I still carry from Bluebeard.
“Before dying, I was at the end of my career. I had nothing else to say,” Refn said.
Three years ago, he received a terrible diagnosis, underwent surgery, died for twenty minutes, and was brought back to life—“like Frankenstein, by electricity,” as he likes to say. When he woke up, he decided he had to do something with the time he had been given as a precious gift.
“When I was dead, I saw into the future.” Things became even more overwhelming as he spoke, since the film is about the devil and hell. Is there redemption in it?
“I was given another chance by God,” Refn said. “… for the kids—my kids.” He began to cry.
I kept wondering how his film was for the kids, but then again, Bluebeard was in a fairytale book.
Refn continued, defining his concept of the “narrative of instant dopamine,” the way children experience the world today. Cinema should respond to that, he argues; it’s how cinema was created. “We live in an artificial, ultracontrolled reality. Art should expand your universe. Children need their minds and horizons opened.” He is interested in what transcends reality—what he calls magic fantasy.
Just before the press conference began, I looked for an early review, curious whether anyone had written about the film yet, only hours after its first screening. I found one describing the film as feeling like ASMR—exactly what Refn was talking about. So was it true? Did he really make it for the kids?
“Making a movie is like going to war,” said Elle’s father. So if a movie is like war, and everything is permitted in love and war, is everything permitted in movies too? That is the question I asked myself as I left the theatre. And it won’t be the last time I ask it during the 79th edition of the Cannes Film Festival.