Mark your 2026 Cannes Film Festival calendars folks – Danish genre mixer specialist Nicolas Winding Refn is once again heading out east setting up shop this time in Tokyo for his next feature film – his seventh and first since 2016’s “The Neon Demon (read review).” Starring the youthful looking cast of Charles Melton, Sophie Thatcher, Kristine Froseth and Havana Rose Liu, Her Private Hell is (according to Variety) will be a linguistic blend of both English and Japanese. We’ll have to wait for an eventual logline.
The Neon folks are getting behind the project and will dangle it on the Croisette next month. No producers have been mentioned yet. While also set in Japan, this appears to be a completely different project from “The Avenging Silence” (about a former European spy who accepts a mission from a Japanese businessman to take down the head of a Yakuza boss in Japan).
Melton broke out with Todd Haynes’ “May December,” Thatcher toplined the recently release “Companion,” Froseth has been padding her resume with indie films such as Kitty Green’s “The Assistant,” and Havana Rose Liu was a supporting character in recent Sundance/Berlinale breakout “Lurker.”
