The inspiration for Hadzihalilovic’s The Ice Tower is Hans Christian Anderson’s iconic fairy tale The Snow Queen. But this isn’t a conventional adaptation or even a re-imagining of the story but a fantasy film depicting a teenage girl’s infatuation with an actress, playing the snow queen in a film studio near the mountains of Italy’s South Tyrol: here reality, dream and movie artifice are seamlessly fused: a supremely confident blurring of setting and sensibility that makes for a hauntingly beautiful watch.
The Ice Tower’s remarkable production design (Julia Irribarria) and superbly atmospheric photography (Jonathan Ricquebourg) keep challenging the viewer about the competing power of the false over the real and vice versa; all the time compellingly drawing us into a seductive narrative. It’s a dangerous, icy place where all who unfortunately love the snow queen are to be sacrificed. The film, slowly but surely, produces a trance-like state - superbly realised by the wonderfully imaginative direction of Lucile Hadzihalilovic.
Before The Ice Tower (2025) we had Innocence (2004) Evolution (2015) and Earwig (2021). Innocence (A tale of a mysterious boarding school, in a dense forest, from which the girls are forbidden to leave) is still perhaps Hadzihalilovic’s best film and a minor masterpiece. Evolution (An SF horror film of young boys disturbed by starfish and women with suckers on their backs) was enigmatic and strangely moving. Her third feature Earwig (A Kafkaesque tale of a young girl and her disturbed father or keeper) was her darkest yet, though disappointingly too much of a hermetic puzzle for me.
You could say that all of her highly original films are allegories blended with a corruption of innocence theme that both attracts and repels. However she also draws on some masters of film. The Ice Tower references in Alfred Hitchcock and Michael Powel, in particular Black Narcissus (The snow queen and her would-be victim walk to the edge of a snowy precipice signalling Powell’s studio recreation of the Himalayas); The Birds (The trouble in the film studio trying to handle a raven recalls Tippi Hedren fighting off a bird attack) and Vertigo (The whorl in the hair bun of the chilly receptionist, at the teenager’s hotel, evokes the look of Kim Novak).
The only instance of filmmaker placement not working is when the snow queen’s film director (played by Gaspar Noe) a real director and husband of Lucile Hadzihalilovic, tells an actor that the next film he’ll be directing will be a thriller in the manner of Hitchcock. I know it’s a nice in-joke but it felt self conscious and irrelevant.
And if there’s one other criticism of The Ice Tower then it’s to do with the actress (a splendid performance by Marion Cotillard) playing the snow queen. Not far from the end of the film she physically goes for her victim Bianca / Jeanne (the outstanding newcomer Clara Pacini) with the relish of a kissing / biting vampire. This disturbs Bianca /Jeanne whose infatuation with the snow queen is a mother identification love and not at all sexual.
I wish the scripting could have followed this with a reflective line of dialogue, or a brief scene that exposed the loneliness and sorrow of an actress acting the role of the snow queen, to contrast with her being the real invulnerable snow queen. I appreciate that The Ice Tower is also a coming of age film which for Bianca /Jeanne ends in deep disappointment. But isn’t there also a level on which both women, as real women and not figures of myth, are equally hurt? Yet would even hinting at any vulnerability to be found in the predatory snow queen weaken her role in the story? Anyway I did sense a stumble here in the script that made out the snow queen’s assault to appear solely lesbian-like desire.
The Ice Tower is almost ‘mainstream’ compared to Hadzihalilovic’s earlier films. It’s certainly her most accessible production and definitely one of my films of the year. And irrespective of any art house movie category deserves to be a popular success at the box office.
- Alan Price, originally published in London Grip
BFI Screenings: https://www.bfi.org.uk/bfi-film-releases/ice-tower
