Nicolas Winding Refn's Feminist Turn

In 2019, Danish auteur Nicolas Winding Refn completed his masterwork, Too Old to Die Young. The Amazon miniseries felt like the apotheosis of everything Refn had been working toward: an extremely slow, neon-drenched, hyper-violent odyssey through the degradations of the modern world. The director employed the approach Paul Schrader defined as transcendental style—taking viewers “beyond normal sense experience”—across a sprawling 13 hours. It should have been a commercial and critical triumph, but Amazon opted to bury the series in the algorithm. To this day, even fans of his films have no idea that he made a miniseries.