sophie thatcher

Her Private Hell (2026)

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Anytime I catch myself wondering “Where have they been?” about a specific actor or director, the answer is always television. Nicolas Winding Refn has produced two high-end TV series since he last graced cinemas with the best film of 2016, which from my limited perspective means he’s spent the last decade enjoying an early retirement. Then, out of nowhere, he premiered his new film Her Private Hell at this year’s Cannes, once again baffling & frustrating fans & critics alike with another slow-motion adventure into his own neon-lit subconscious. Her Private Hell presented an opportunity for a grand Refn comeback tour, dragging the acquired-taste auteur out of the hazy obscurity of luxury TV streaming series and back into the glamorous spotlight of festival-circuit red carpets. Instead, he chose to double down on the prickliest, most alienating aspects of his work with no apparent urge to gain new fans or win over old haters. It’s like the 50-something filmmaker skipped the middle period of his career so he could rush directly into his “late style” era. Imagine if Coppola had fucked off for ten years after making The Godfather and then immediately came back with Megalopolis, or if David Lynch had jumped straight into Inland Empire after Blue Velvet, without laying the decades of artistic & thematic groundwork that earns an audience’s trust & good will. Older, venerated filmmakers of that stature are given a lot of leeway to go big and go vague without guiding the audience along the way with the usual handholding tactics of Narrative, Structure, Entertainment, and Taste. There’s something extremely bratty about Refn acting as if he’s entitled to that same reverence & grace at such a relatively young age, and so long since he last pleased a crowd with his jacket-and-soundtrack-selling hit Drive. As always, I admire the audacity.

Structurally, Her Private Hell combines the two most alienating titles from Refn’s back catalog—The Neon Demon & Only God Forgives—into a crude, volatile mash-up where they never quite gel into a new singular work. Sophie Thatcher stars in the Neon Demon half, playing a jaded, sneering actress in a sci-fi dystopia who gets back at her emotionally checked-out father by sexually pursuing his wife (and her former bestie, played by Havana Rose Liu). Charles Melton headlines the Only God Forgives half, playing an American bruiser in post-WWII Tokyo, who’s willing to crush infinite skulls and suffer infinite tortures in his pursuit to get his daughter back from gangster kidnappers. How these two temporally dissonant stories are related is anyone’s guess; they share a thematic impulse to reunite broken families, but they’re otherwise rigidly segregated. Certain sequences of the edit suggest that Melton’s buff, shirtless soldier of a forgotten neon-noir past has been entirely dreamed up by Thatcher’s lonely, horny actress from our neon-melodrama future, as the story often shifts to his perspective at the exact moment that her head hits a pillow. More directly, they are connected by a mysterious mist that hangs heavy over both of their rotten cities, physicalizing the ambiguity of the temporal & geographical settings Refn sketches out here. Another figure who emerges from that mist is an entity known only as The Leather Man: a hulking presence dressed head to toe in black leather, studded with diamonds, who occasionally rips women’s chests open with his bare hands as if he’s spatchcocking a turkey. If the mist is a physical manifestation of the film’s ambiguity, The Leather Man is a physical manifestation of its dread – a walking, stalking avatar of Bad Vibes. All three of these central figures are really just isolated figments of Refn’s imagination, relegated to their own distinct movie realms, only accessed by dreams, only connected by mist.

While Her Private Hell mostly operates on post-giallo dream logic, it announces itself as a futuristic fairy tale with a wry Hans Christian Andersen name-drop in its very first scene. Instead of the usual driving synths that provide a sense of momentum in Refn’s otherwise static tableaus, this outing is scored by old-timer Pino Donaggio with the fluttering harps & strings that usually accompany bedtime fairy tales, marking the exact moment that a character falls asleep and drifts into a magical other-realm. Thatcher’s attention-starved protagonist makes that framing clear in her direct references to her love interest (and familial rival) as her “Wicked Stepmother,” while debating whether to fuck or kill her as retribution for the betrayal of marrying her father. If Her Private Hell is a bedtime storybook, though, it’s one that’s only suitable for overly patient perverts who’ve already flipped through all of the available Bertrand Mandico, Yann Gonzales, Jane Schoenbrun, Amanda Kramer, Hélène Cattet and Bruno Forzani titles on the shelf and are looking to add one just more neon spotlight to their oncoming dream. When The Neon Demon first hit theaters a decade ago, there was a “What am I even looking at?” quality to it that has since faded as so many other, hungrier auteurs have made names for themselves playing Refn’s game. The diamond & leather studded killer and the characters who are named after punk icons like Johnny Thunders & Nico can’t help but recall Mandico’s work in particular, even if Refn was already doing his thing well before The Wild Boys. Appreciation of Her Private Hell requires an appreciation of all beautifully lit, eerily empty film genres, as exemplified by Thatcher & company seemingly working on a Planet of the Vampires remake in-between their semi-incestuous sexual rivalries and inert fashion magazine editorials, adding 60s sci-fi kitsch to the already sky-high pile of retro genre references. Refn is in some ways very giving here, offering the audience a whole lot of everything while, paradoxically, lulling us to sleep with a cold, mystifying sparseness. Everything he loves is carefully arranged on the screen but rarely set in motion, with little care for whether there’s an audience out there who loves him back.

-Brandon Ledet

Companion (2025)

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It’s no surprise that Companion is advertised by association with producer Zach Creggers’s previous film Barbarian, as there’s a lot of fun being had by mixing an inconsistent light tone with a genuinely tense horror atmosphere, bending what could otherwise be pretty straightforward genre fare into something novel. Iris (Sophie Thatcher) is the sweetly innocent girlfriend of Josh (Jack Quaid), with whom she had a cute first meeting at a supermarket. The film opens on them making their way to the lakehouse of Sergey (Rupert Friend), who is the boyfriend of Josh’s friend Kat (Megan Suri). Also joining for the weekend are Kat and Josh’s old friend Eli (Harvey Guillén), and Eli’s partner Patrick (Lucas Gage). After an awkward interaction between Kat and Iris that establishes Iris’s belief that Kat hates her isn’t all in her head, the group has a little dance party and Iris’s reaction to the story of Patrick and Eli’s own meet cute implies she may be overinvested in her relationship. Things go completely awry the next morning when Sergey attempts to assault Iris while the two are alone at the lake shore, with deadly results. 

I’m going to go into BIG SPOILERS here, even though I’m not sure we can even call them that, since the marketing for this film has largely given it away. In fact, one of the friends that I invited to the screening I attended spoiled herself from the trailer so much that she decided she didn’t even want to see it. It’s almost impossible to talk about this movie without getting into it. Still here? Okay. The title “Companion” isn’t just about Iris being Josh’s girlfriend; it relates to the fact that she is a gynoid girlfriend. If you manage to avoid being spoiled for this, as I was, this is foreshadowed several times. First, Iris awakens in the car when Josh says “Iris, wake up,” which doesn’t seem unusual at that time but later turns out to be her activation phrase (with its inverse being her sleep mode instruction). She’s also extremely polite to Josh’s self-driving car, which seems to bemuse him, and Kat later tells Iris that the latter’s existence makes her feel replaceable. The hints get thicker as the revelation approaches, like when Iris responds with precise temperature and forecast information when Josh asks her what the weather will be like that day. 

Iris herself is a model from the Empathix company, and although the companionship droids that they provide have safeguards built in—the same strength as a human of the same build, programming that prevents the droids from harming people or other living things, and an inability to lie—Josh has “jailbroken” her so that she responded with lethal force to Sergey. This is part of an elaborate plan between Josh and Kat to steal Sergey’s money, with Patrick and Eli in attendance to unwittingly provide corroborating testimony that Sergey was killed by Iris. When Josh reactivates Iris in order to “say goodbye,” he sets up his own downfall, as she is able to escape from the lakehouse and flee into the wilderness nearby, and Josh et al must track her down and reboot her before the police arrive in order to disguise his complicity in her reprogramming and ensure their impunity in Sergey’s death. 

Like Barbarian before it, this is an exciting ride with twists and turns beyond the initial reveal that Iris isn’t the girl she seems to be that propel the action along. Jack Quaid plays a variation on his 5cream character, the seemingly nice, perfect boyfriend who turns out to be a pathetic manchild whose motivations are driven by a sense of entitlement. In that slasher, it was that he was a superfan with a grudge (“How can fandom be toxic?”). Here, he’s a seemingly unambitious man who rants about nice guys finishing last and demonstrates other such personality flaws. That’s two-for-two for movies getting a lot of mileage out of Quaid’s cute face and presumed innocence, but I hope we don’t go to that well too often (this screening featured a trailer for his upcoming action-hero-who-can’t-feel-pain flick Novocaine, and it’s nice to see him doing something different). I praised Sophie Thatcher up and down for her work in Heretic, and she carries this movie with aplomb. Iris is both Sarah Connor and the Terminator (a comparison that the film makes textual through both recreating the metal endoskeletal hand scene and putting a killer android in a police uniform à la T2), determined but not unstoppable. I’m sure a lot of this may seem derivative to some: yes, we also saw sliders for personality traits for robotic humans on Westworld; yes, this is in some ways another take on The Stepford Wives. But all writing is rewriting and all creation is remixing, and Companion is clever and novel in its approach. 

-Mark “Boomer” Redmond

Heretic (2024)

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The premise of Heretic is a good one. Two teenage girl missionaries from the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints (you know, Mormons) are invited into the home of a potential convert, only to realize he may have a better knowledge of their faith than they do and that his intentions are sinister. As a result, the first act of the film is very strong, as the dyed-in-the-wool believer Sister Paxton (Chloe East) and the more worldly convert Sister Barnes (Sophie Thatcher, of Yellowjackets) bond over the divergent ways that they see the world before becoming trapped in the home of the seemingly harmless Mr. Reed (Hugh Grant). From there, as he starts to ask questions about their beliefs that reveal that he has a strong knowledge of Mormonism and which pokes at the outer edges of their own familiarity with doctrine, the girls become more and more uncomfortable with his familiarity and apparent deception. Where is the wife that he claims is in the house, and upon whose supposed existence the missionaries’ willingness to enter the home is predicated? And why, when they attempt to leave while he is out of the room, do they discover that the door is locked and all of the windows are impossible to open? 

I was already familiar with what a strong performer Thatcher was from her excellent portrayal of the younger version of Juliette Lewis’s character in Yellowjackets, and she’s marvelous here in the role of a young woman who was initially raised in a home with no religious affiliation and who became a member of her faith later in childhood. A more obvious route to go with this character would be to make her an overt zealot like many later-life converts often are, or to have Sister Barnes be a non-believer who’s been conscripted into doing mission work because that’s what’s expected of her simply because her mother fell into a faith in the wake of a failed marriage. Instead, she’s an earnest believer, albeit a modern one, and that makes her genuine friendship with lifelong church devotee Sister Paxton feel all the more earnest and sincere. Paxton comes from a large family in which she is one of eight children (gotta keep that quiver full, am I right, elders?), and she’s written with an incredibly accurate understanding of what kind of girl emerges from these families and their religious traditions. She’s sweetly innocent and undersocialized, but she’s also strong under pressure. I spent many unfortunate years in my youth attending a Christian school that was part of an evangelical megachurch, and which also served as the host for at least one annual fundamentalist homeschooling convention. I’ve met many Sister Paxtons in my life, and there’s something very knowing about the way that she’s written on the page here that hints at a similar familiarity with fundamentalist kids on the part of the screenwriters. That they manage to communicate this so well in the film’s opening scene, in which Paxton talks about having seen an amateur hardcore video (which she endearingly refers to as “porno-nography,” which is very fundie-coded) while also showing that she, like Barnes, is finding her way in a modern world as she claims that she saw the truth of God in the porn, even if only for a moment. Both characters are remarkably well-conceived and performed. It’s unfortunate that the film devolves so quickly after the opening minutes of the second act. 

I went into this one with little knowledge beyond the basic logline, and I was on the edge of my seat throughout the first thirty minutes. After an incident in which Paxton is humiliated by some secular girls, she’s already slightly ill at ease, and Mr. Reed’s apparent warm, chummy openness to receiving their evangelizing comes right on the heels of it, so it’s easy to understand how getting back into the routine of sharing her faith feels comforting enough that the first signs that his intentions are sinister might fly under the radar. Once it becomes clear that he’s been deceptive about everything and has locked them inside, he lures the girls into a fake chapel behind his living room where he proceeds to give them a lecture about how, as a student, he studied the beliefs of several different faiths, only to come to the conclusion that all of them were false, and thus set out to determine which was the one true faith. There are some great bits in this sequence as well, like how he compares the major Abrahamic religions to various iterations of the same ideology by using versions of the board game Monopoly (and its predecessor, the anti-capitalist Landlord’s Game) and also doing a terrible, terrible impression of Jar Jar Binks. As it turns out, the girls have fallen into his spiderweb where he now seeks to convert them to his faith, and he offers them the choice to pass through one of two doors, one labeled “Belief,” and the other “Disbelief.” Ironically, it’s the convert Sister Barnes who chooses “Belief,” and she attempts to convince Paxton to join her, while Paxton chooses “Disbelief,” based on her understanding of Mr. Reed’s serpentine logic. Ultimately, both doors lead down a set of stairs into the same dungeon, and it’s here that the film starts to fall apart. 

Spoilers ahead. There was a portion of this film that I spent believing that this might be one of those plots where a seemingly irrational belief on the part of someone with authority might turn out to be true, with the possibility that Reed was spreading a sincerely-believed gospel that he had somehow received through true divine revelation. The fact that the victims were members of the LDS church, a denomination that traced its existence to a verifiably historical person and whose faith is based on a supposed divine revelation to that person laid some groundwork for this to be the case. I’m thinking of something like 10 Cloverfield Lane, where we see everything through the eyes of a protagonist who has no real reason to believe that the supposed apocalypse above ground is real and not merely the lies of a kidnapper, or the classic Twilight Zone episode “The Howling Man,” in which a lost traveller appears at a monastery and is told that an apparently innocently imprisoned man is a captured devil, only to release the man out of kindness and learn that the monks were telling the truth. I think this would have been a much more interesting place for the narrative to go. Instead, what we get is a Saw variation in which Reed manipulates events to try and convert the girls to the concept of the only true god being “control.” Ironically, it’s his lack of control over all of the circumstances in the dungeon (as well as an oversimplification of certain religious precepts to make them appear more common across multiple belief systems, which doesn’t hold up under scrutiny) that allow for the girls to see through his deception. Instead, this becomes a cut-rate Barbarian that completely fails to stick the landing. Ultimately, the pontification about religion and what that means to Reed’s motivation is a lot of window dressing for some gross-out scenes. 

I don’t know how to explain it other than to say this: Heretic feels like it was written by a really, really smart college freshman. Someone who has seen a lot of horror movies and comes from a religious background that they’re now grappling with in their art, creating a film that’s full of Intro to Religious Studies intersections that are ultimately a little shallow. Where it functions best is in its work as a character study of Barnes and Paxton, and one of my viewing companions and I had the same thought about the film when coming out of the screening: this would make for a strong stage play, with the story remaining confined in Reed’s parlor as he plays mind games on the girls to break their faith. As it is, once we go down the stairs into the basement where Reed has supposedly managed to confine his “prophet,” this completely stops working for me. Beyond the stellar performances from both Thatcher and East, there are some notably cinematic moments that deserve to be called out. I love the final moment before the credits roll, when the final girl manages to escape into the snow and a Monarch butterfly alights on her hand, calling back to a prior conversation in which Paxton reveals that if she wanted to let her loved ones know that she was safe on the other side, a butterfly would be the sign. There’s also a really fun transition near the end of the film when one of the girls is fleeing from the depths of Reed’s murder basement and we see her progress through this via an overhead shot of a miniature of the house, which Reed has been using to keep track of all of his moving pieces; the missionary escapes the miniature maze via breaking into the room where the miniature is, so we see her break out in both micro and macro forms. It’s just too bad that this movie’s hard turn into early aughts torture porn aesthetics and late night freshman dormitory religious discussion ruins the overall text.

-Mark “Boomer” Redmond