Although he is best known for films with male protagonists – such as Pusher (1996), which initiated his cinematic career as well as that of Mads Mikkelsen, and the Ryan Gosling-starring, and Cannes award-winning, Drive (2011) – the oeuvre of Danish director Nicolas Winding Refn also contains four entries which feature women as their central characters. Furthermore, each of these women is associated with the supernatural.

The first such entry is, perhaps surprisingly, Nemesis, the feature-length, Gothic-toned episode of the ITV ‘cosy crime’ series Agatha Christie’s Marple which Refn directed in 2007. Nemesis presents an iteration of the detective Miss Marple (Geraldine McEwan) as the living embodiment of the eponymous Greek goddess of retribution, even if she herself is not quite aware of her true nature.

The next is 2016’s The Neon Demon, a loose adaptation of Sheridan Le Fanu’s Gothic novella Carmilla (1872), in which an aspiring model (Elle Fanning) is possessed by a malevolent entity and encounters a woman, Ruby (Jena Malone), who may be a vampire. The Neon Demon is followed by Too Old To Die Young (2019), Refn’s mini-series for Amazon Studios, in which Cartel enforcer Yaritza (Cristina Rodlo) is the current incarnation of an ancient Aztec death-goddess, and Diana (Malone), a ‘victim advocate’, receives visions from supernatural entities known as ‘the Beings’.

Finally, there is Miu (Angela Bundalovic), the protagonist of Refn’s Netflix series Copenhagen Cowboy (2023), an enigmatic young woman rumoured to bring good fortune to others but revealed, as the series develops, to be much more than a lucky charm and, indeed, more than human. Miu encounters her own ‘nemesis’ in the form of Rakel (Lola Corfixen), presented as a type of vampire who, like Miu, appears to be not of this earth.
This paper presents a comparative analysis of these four works by Refn, placing them in the context of his oeuvre as a whole and charting his move away from the realism of Pusher and other early films to a focus on characters associated with the supernatural initiated by his iteration of Miss Marple.