Her Private Hell — A Lacanian Reading of the Film
I just watched Her Private Hell, and I honestly think this is an astonishingly detailed film.
For the first thirty minutes, I was tempted to stop watching. I had almost no idea what I was watching or where it was going. But then something clicked, and the rest of the film flew by. It felt less like watching a conventional narrative and more like watching a dream: a dream that clearly wants to tell you something, but refuses to tell you exactly what.
The neon lighting, the strange color palette, the haunting music, the slow movements, the cryptic dialogue, the bizarre characters and the almost ritualistic violence all make it feel like a nightmare rather than a conventional sci-fi/horror story.
I have been thinking about it through a largely Lacanian framework, and I think several seemingly random details begin to form a surprisingly coherent structure.
This is obviously an interpretation rather than a claim about what Nicolas Winding Refn consciously intended. But I think the film is deliberately constructed in a way that allows this reading.
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- The Leather Man / the Letter Man
The first thing that struck me is the name Leather Man.
In English, Leather Man and Letter Man sound remarkably similar.
That made me think of the Name-of-the-Father.
If Leather Man can be heard as Letter Man, he becomes something like the "Man of the Letter" — the man of the signifier, language, naming and law.
And that is exactly what the Leather Man seems to represent.
He is not simply a monster who kills young women. He appears as a terrifying embodiment of a paternal law that governs female bodies through violence, desire and possession.
In Lacan, of course, the Name-of-the-Father is not literally the father. It is a signifier that introduces the subject into the symbolic order and organizes desire and prohibition.
So I don't think the Leather Man should simply be equated with "the father."
I would rather see him as the monstrous return of paternal law in the Real.
Johnny Thunder can represent the father in the social and symbolic order: wealth, power, ownership, cinema, sexuality, authority.
The Leather Man may be the same structure returning in its monstrous, irrational, Real form.
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- Elle — "she"
The name Elle seems incredibly important.
In French, elle simply means "she."
It is barely a proper name at all. It is a pronoun.
"She."
Which she?
Any girl.
Every girl.
This makes Elle feel less like a completely individual character and more like a position occupied by the feminine subject.
And it fits the Leather Man's victims: he doesn't seem to be hunting one particular woman. He hunts young women as such.
Elle therefore becomes both an individual character and a structural position: "she."
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- Dominic
Dominic/Dominique comes from the Latin dominus, meaning lord/master.
This makes her name interesting in relation to Johnny Thunder.
She is his wife and therefore, symbolically, "belongs" to the lord/master.
If Johnny Thunder represents a powerful paternal structure — wealth, social authority, cinema and ownership — Dominic is the woman already incorporated into that structure.
But there is another fascinating detail:
Apparently, Dominic and Elle used to be friends.
Now they are rivals.
Why?
I think they may represent two different positions within the same feminine structure.
Elle is the girl who has not yet fully entered the paternal order.
Dominic is the woman who already has.
Dominic has entered the world of sexuality, marriage, power and representation. Elle is still searching for her father.
In that sense, Dominic may represent Elle's possible future.
And Elle may represent Dominic's lost past.
Their friendship becoming rivalry may therefore be more than jealousy between two women. They are two different positions within the same fantasy of femininity.
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- Thunder — the "ordinary" woman
There is another important female character: Thunder, the young woman who is apparently supposed to act with Elle in a film.
This is different from Johnny Thunder.
Thunder seems to come from a much more ordinary, popular/social background. Unlike Dominic, she doesn't belong to the elite world of Johnny Thunder; and unlike Elle, she isn't positioned as the mysterious daughter searching for her father.
The three women are therefore potentially three different positions:
- Elle — the daughter / the mysterious feminine subject
- Dominic — the woman incorporated into power
- Thunder — the ordinary woman trying to enter the world of cinema and representation
And this makes the film-within-the-film very interesting.
They are supposed to make a movie together.
But before they can make that movie, they themselves become characters inside another movie.
In other words:
They don't make the film. The film makes them.
Thunder wants to become an actress and enter the image.
Dominic is already deeply incorporated into the world of image, sexuality and power.
Elle ultimately becomes something even more radical: she doesn't merely enter the image — she takes control of the power behind it.
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- Nicky and the failure of desire
Then there is Nicky, the famous womanizer.
Thunder wants to seduce him but cannot.
Dominic sleeps with him.
Later Elle sleeps with him.
Why can Dominic and Elle have Nicky while Thunder cannot?
I don't think this is simply about attractiveness or sexual competition.
Nicky seems to function as an object of desire.
In Lacanian terms, he is almost a mobile phallic object — something the women desire, but which can never actually provide the completion they seek.
Thunder wants Nicky but cannot possess him.
Dominic possesses him sexually, but what does she actually experience?
She says something extremely strange afterward:
«"Nicky tasted like soap."»
Why emphasize that?
On a literal level, it could simply be a strange detail about his mouth or hygiene. But the film deliberately highlights it.
Soap cleans the body. It removes traces, smells, dirt and bodily residue.
So after sex — the most intimate bodily contact — Dominic describes Nicky not through pleasure, desire or passion, but through cleanliness.
He tastes like soap.
The desired object, once actually encountered, becomes strangely empty, artificial and sanitized.
The fantasy of the object and the Real of the encounter are not the same thing.
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- Thunder becomes a spectator
This is where things become much more interesting.
Thunder cannot have Nicky.
So she watches.
She watches Nicky having sex with Elle.
And at precisely this point, the Leather Man appears and kills her.
I don't think this is accidental.
Thunder has moved from the position of the subject who desires to the position of the spectator who looks at the desire of another subject.
And that is exactly what we, the audience, are doing.
We are watching Elle.
We are watching Nicky.
We are watching sex.
We are watching the spectacle.
We think we possess the gaze.
But perhaps the film is suggesting the opposite:
the image possesses us.
The spectator believes they are outside the fantasy, looking into it.
But the spectator is already caught inside the structure of the fantasy.
And when Thunder becomes conscious of her position as spectator, the Leather Man comes for her.
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- Dominic undergoes the same transformation
Something very similar happens with Dominic.
She has sex with Nicky.
Then Elle violently confronts her and makes her understand that she can never be like Elle.
This moment is crucial.
Elle destroys Dominic's fantasy of herself.
Dominic can no longer imagine herself as the woman occupying the same position as Elle.
And this changes her position.
She is no longer simply the woman participating in the fantasy.
She becomes the woman looking at the fantasy.
She becomes a spectator.
And then the Leather Man appears and kills her.
So perhaps there is a recurring structure:
subject of desire → collapse of fantasy → spectator → Leather Man
Thunder experiences it.
Dominic experiences it.
And we, as viewers, are placed in an analogous position.
The Leather Man therefore may not simply be the monster who kills women.
He may represent the violent return of the structure that prevents the subject from escaping the fantasy.
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- The film within the film
This makes the planned movie that Elle, Thunder and Dominic are supposed to make much more meaningful.
Maybe it isn't just an irrelevant subplot.
It may be a miniature version of the entire film.
Three women from different social and symbolic positions are supposed to become actresses in a film.
But before they can create a representation, they themselves become trapped inside one.
Cinema is therefore not merely something they do.
Cinema is something that happens to them.
They become images.
They become objects of the gaze.
And Thunder's death is especially significant because she dies while watching a sexual scene.
Her attempt to become part of the image turns into her becoming a spectator of the image — and then the image consumes her.
This feels very close to Refn's obsession with women as images, especially in The Neon Demon.
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- The East and the West
There is another detail I haven't been able to fully resolve, but I think it matters.
K and Dominic are Eastern, while Elle and her father belong to the Western world.
Dominic is an Eastern woman who has married Johnny Thunder, an enormously powerful Western man.
If we read the film politically, this could suggest a relationship between Western power and the appropriation of Eastern femininity.
Dominic is literally incorporated into the household of a powerful Western patriarch.
Her body and sexuality become part of his world.
So the East/West division might parallel another division:
the feminine body / Western power
the object / the owner
the colonized / the colonizer
I don't think this explains the entire film, but it seems too deliberate to ignore.
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- Private K and Kafka's K
The male protagonist is called Private K.
That immediately reminded me of Kafka's K., especially Joseph K. from The Trial.
K is a man wandering through a system whose rules he doesn't understand, searching for something that remains obscure.
But there is an interesting inversion here.
Kafka's Joseph K. is searching for the law.
Private K is searching for his daughter.
He is trying to avenge/save her after she becomes a victim of the Leather Man.
He is therefore another version of the father.
But unlike Johnny Thunder, he is powerless.
Johnny Thunder is the father as authority.
Private K is the father as loss.
One possesses.
The other searches.
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- The Leather Man does not cut the girls' hands
This distinction is extremely important.
The Leather Man does not cut the girls' hands.
He violently tears open their chests.
The hands belong to a completely different symbolic system.
The Leather Man kills women by opening the chest — penetrating the center of the body, the place of the heart, lungs and life.
His violence is therefore an invasion of the feminine body.
But there is an old legend within the film:
the Leather Man can only be killed by cutting off his hands.
And this is exactly what Elle eventually does.
She uses the hammer given to her by her father to cut off the Leather Man's hands.
That changes the meaning of the ending completely.
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- The father's hammer
This might be the most important object in the entire film.
Elle kills the Leather Man with her father's hammer.
So the structure becomes:
Father → gives weapon → daughter → kills the monster/paternal figure → takes his power
The daughter uses the father's own instrument to destroy the monstrous embodiment of paternal law.
And this is where I think the film becomes profoundly Lacanian.
Elle does not simply "escape the father."
She uses the father's symbolic power to overthrow the father.
She therefore moves from:
daughter under the law
to
subject who carries the law.
Strictly speaking, the Lacanian Name-of-the-Father is not a person whose seat can simply be occupied. It is a signifier.
But at the level of the film's imagery, Elle appears to take the place previously occupied by the paternal power.
The father dies.
But the function of the father remains.
The father disappears; the Name remains.
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- The hands of the Leather Man
This also gives the hands a completely different meaning.
The Leather Man's hands are not his weakness.
They are the source of his power.
Hands are the organs of action, possession, control and creation.
So Elle does not merely kill the monster.
She removes the hands through which paternal power acts upon the world.
And the reversal is striking:
At the beginning, the man's hands have power over women's bodies.
At the end, the man's hands are literally in the woman's possession.
The body of the woman is no longer in the man's hands.
The man's hands are now in the woman's hands.
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- "Now you can be complete."
And then comes one of the most revealing lines in the film.
The severed hands/gloves of the Leather Man are given to Elle, and she is told:
«"Now you can be complete."»
This is where I think the film almost openly invokes the Lacanian concept of the phallus.
Not the penis.
The phallus as the signifier of symbolic power and the fantasy of completion.
The subject believes:
"If I possess this, I will finally be complete."
Elle has been searching for her father.
She has been searching for something missing.
And now she receives the symbol of paternal power.
The promise is:
Now you are complete.
But Lacan would tell us the opposite:
The subject can never become complete.
Lack cannot simply be eliminated.
So the final line may actually expose a dangerous fantasy:
«If you possess the phallus, your lack will disappear.»
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- Elle has killed the father — but has she escaped him?
This is where the ending becomes ambiguous.
Elle destroys the paternal monster.
But in order to do so, she must inherit his power.
She takes the father's weapon.
She cuts off the father's hands.
She receives the hands.
And then she is told that she can finally be complete.
So has she actually escaped the paternal structure?
Or has she simply taken its place?
This is, to me, much more interesting than a simple feminist "girl kills monster" interpretation.
The film may be saying:
The daughter must kill the father in order to become a subject — but after killing him, she discovers that she has inherited the very structure she fought against.
That is the paradox.
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- Dominic's death and her return as a girl
There is another strange moment at the end.
Dominic, after being killed by the Leather Man, appears again in the form of a young girl and returns to her father, K.
This is fascinating because Dominic has been a woman throughout the film.
After death, she becomes a girl again.
Almost as if she is returned to a position before mature femininity and sexuality.
And she goes back to the father.
So Dominic and Elle may represent two possible outcomes.
Dominic → return to girlhood / return to the father
Elle → kill the paternal figure / inherit paternal power
One returns to the father.
The other becomes structurally closer to the father.
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- And this makes Elle and Dominic's relationship much more tragic
If Dominic represents a possible future for Elle, their conflict becomes much more than rivalry.
Dominic may be what Elle could become if she enters the paternal structure without challenging it.
Elle may represent the possibility of breaking that structure.
But the film gives us a disturbing twist:
Elle only breaks it by becoming its new carrier.
So Dominic and Elle are not simply two women fighting over men.
They are two different solutions to the same problem of femininity under the paternal order.
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- The three women
At this point, I think the three women can be read as three positions:
Thunder
The ordinary woman.
She wants to enter the image.
She wants Nicky.
She cannot possess him.
She becomes a spectator.
She is killed.
Dominic
The woman already incorporated into the image and the paternal order.
She believes she occupies a desirable position.
Elle destroys that fantasy.
Dominic becomes a spectator.
She is killed.
After death, she returns as a girl to the father.
Elle
The daughter.
She begins inside the paternal fantasy.
She searches for her father.
She eventually recognizes the structure, confronts the monster and destroys him with her father's own weapon.
She receives the father's hands.
She is told she can now be complete.
And therefore she becomes the most ambiguous figure of all:
the woman who defeats the father by inheriting him.
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- Leather Man as father, law, gaze and cinema
This is where my interpretation becomes less literal.
I don't think Leather Man necessarily represents only one thing.
He may be a condensation of several structures:
- the father
- the Name-of-the-Father
- paternal law
- the violent Real behind symbolic authority
- the male gaze
- the power that turns women into images
- perhaps even cinema itself
That would explain why he feels less like a conventional character and more like a nightmare-symbol.
He appears when the fantasy breaks.
He appears when women move from participating in the image to looking at the image.
And he is finally destroyed when Elle takes control of the symbolic power that produced him.
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- So what is "Her Private Hell"?
Perhaps the hell isn't simply the world of the Leather Man.
Perhaps the "private hell" is the fantasy itself.
Every character is trapped in a different fantasy:
Thunder wants to become part of the image.
Dominic wants to occupy the position of the desirable woman.
Nicky is the object of desire.
Private K wants to recover his daughter.
Elle wants to find her father.
And the audience wants to understand the film.
But every time the fantasy is exposed, something monstrous appears.
That is why the movie feels like a dream.
Dreams don't work by giving every symbol a single dictionary definition.
They work through condensation, displacement and the sliding of signifiers.
And Her Private Hell seems to operate exactly this way:
Leather / Letter
Elle / "she"
K / Kafka's K
Father / Leather Man
Hands / power / phallus
Hammer / paternal inheritance
Girl / woman
Desire / gaze
Actor / spectator
Image / reality
Everything slides into something else.
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My final reading
I don't think Her Private Hell is ultimately about a monster hunting women.
I think it is about what happens when a woman becomes aware that she is an object inside somebody else's fantasy.
Dominic discovers it.
Thunder discovers it.
And they die.
Elle goes one step further.
She does not merely escape the fantasy.
She destroys the figure that sustains it.
But the price is that she inherits his power.
So the final question is not:
"Did Elle defeat the father?"
She clearly did.
The more disturbing question is:
«"What happens when the daughter becomes the one who holds the father's hands?"»
And perhaps the final line — "Now you can be complete" — is not a happy ending at all.
It may be the most horrifying line in the entire film.
Because if Lacan is right, there is no such thing as completion.
The fantasy of becoming complete is itself the trap.
And that may be her private hell.
Posted Aug 10, 2026, 4:15 PM UTC