The Worlds of Lucille Hadzihalilovic. Severin Films (USA) 2026. 4 disc Blue Ray box set.
Over a period of 21 years Lucille Hadzihalilovic has produced a highly original body of work. Four feature films and a handful of shorts that have challenged our view of the relationship between children/adolescents socially controlled by adults, both visible and invisible, not in a conventional sense of upbringing and nurture but what happens when you split off the child from normality to develop in an experimental self-contained world: a poetical fantasy space where freedom and control create states of alternating between fear and joy.
Hadzihalilovic draws upon fairy tales and allegories, to situate her stories in an SF or Horror context, only to disarm the viewer by a daring perspective concerned with the evolution of the young self. She has a biological obsession with change and the passage of time - from caterpillar to butterfly where adult forces might save or destroy you in the process.
In a Hadzihalilovic film water is a significant character. We’ve evolved from the sea and are drawn back to water. This is apparent in her first feature Innocence (2004) and its opening images of rushing water, forest, earth and an underground cellar with a door mysteriously marked as number 3. We then cut to the interior of a secluded school for very young girls. There lies a coffin from out of which emerges six year old Iris. She’s met with warmth by six girls who all wear matching dresses and ribbons in their hair corresponding to their age and year in the school. Iris is given a red ribbon and is taken under the charge of 12 year old Bianca now wearing a violet ribbon. Although sub-plots introduce us to other girls, the adult female teachers and other menial staff it’s the journey of Iris and Bianca that will concern us most.
No boys are allowed in the school as the girls receive their education consisting of dance lessons, the study of animals and much recreation. The children have a great deal of free time but are not allowed to leave until their education is complete. Their teachers are kindly but firm. As one of them says of the girls they are “ugly little caterpillars” who must be patient and obey instructions, waiting to metamorphose into butterfly graduates.
There are beautifully shot scenes of children swimming and splashing in a lake; walking along a forest lit by lamps; displaying their dancing skills to tutors or simply walking alongside the walls of the grounds and contemplating what lies beyond their confines. Such moments are never exploitative but observational of the children’s slow development towards puberty. All are filmed so lyrically that you keep sensing that the idyll will one day be shattered. One or two children don’t accept the school regime and either escape or die an accidental death. But this is a world that naturally invokes the first poems of say Blake’s Songs of Innocence and Experience where apprehension and anticipation reign just before a euphoric coming through, the children’s return to the outside world: though at the climax of Innocence it’s not the deadening effects of Blakean experience but the joy of Bianca being bathed in water at a public square fountain and her sexual awakening.
The visuals of Innocence are never stilted by cute, sentimental beauty but alive and fluid with a surreal poetry that recalls the cinema of Jean Vigo and, in its scenes of subdued menace, the fragile tenderness of Georges Franju. As an adult audience we can project our anxiety on what is really going on with the children in this hidden, dream-like place but this tense projection is constantly dispelled because of Hadzihalilovic’s ability to create a state of wonderment and mystery so powerfully that explanations become redundant, even irrelevant. Innocence like Last Year at Marienbad becomes a seductive puzzle film that can take on numerous meanings or enjoyed for being a self-contained rites of passage enigma.
In Hadzihalilovic’s second feature Evolution (2015) we are kicked out of the young girls’ Eden and placed in a young boys’ hell of experimentation. At an unnamed community near the sea a boy named Nicolas sees the body of a dead boy with a red starfish on his side. His mother brings the body ashore and the other mothers assemble around it. Nicholas is suffering from an unnamed malady which Mother treats with a dubious medicine. She takes him to a hospital where a doctor operates on Nicolas. He doesn’t believe he is really ill and doubts that Mother is really his true mother. At night she and the other women writhe about in mud on the rocks by the sea and later on Nicolas sees what looks like suckers on her back. Like the appearance of the starfish these aquatic phenomena are threatening to the body.
As with Innocence you can marvel at the opening scenes of Evolution which, though now in muted colours, hark back to silent cinema avant-gardism (Jean Epstein’s films especially Finis Terrae is evoked). The rocks, sea, coral reef, Nicolas swimming beneath a dead body, that haunting star fish, Mother’s fish-like countenance and then thirty minutes into the film there’s a visually stunning recapitulation of the earlier discoveries and their threat: Nicolas lies on an operating table as the photography of Manuel Dacosse exquisitely reveals two tiny crosses of white light, resembling a starfish, on the boy’s open eyes.
In Innocence we had control of children with an ambivalent even suspect well being. This has now turned into malign SF / horror. If the little girls received experimental child rearing the little boys are subject to operations on their bodies to change them, like their so called mother’s, into a different species. Mother and child will return to the ocean – for a reproduction and shape shifting into disturbing mythological creatures is now possible. Suffice to say that Nicola’s friendship with the nurse Stella offers him a slither of hope. Evolution’s slippery (forgive the fish pun) narrative is less of a puzzle maker than a radical reinterpretation of a horror sea tale yarn (think William Hope Hodgson colliding with Darwinism and Frankenstein).
Texture, sound design, photography and performances exert a hypnotic power over the viewer. What am I seeing or perhaps dreaming? This is the constant question you ask when formulaic genre conventions are overturned and transformed by Hadzihalilovic’s great filmmaking confidence as, swirling in the weird darkness of her fable, there is a surprising sympathy not only for Evolution’s controlled but their controllers, even if a hospitalised friend of Nicolas’s says “They’re killing us.”
Earwig (2021) is the only disappointment of this box set. Technically it’s as brilliant as the other films but abstruse and hermetic: emotionally detached to the point of an icy coldness. The problem is that the film focuses more on the adults than the child. Not that the adults Albert (the guardian of Mia a little girl, who has no teeth, and must be kept in good health); Celeste (the barmaid Albert injures with a broken bottle) and Laurence (the mysterious man who befriends Celeste) aren’t interesting but their back story is made murky or non-existent. For me they felt like sub-plots that were fore-fronted too much so as to pull away from the story of the young girl. I wanted to learn more about the identity of Mia. Like Bianca from Innocence and Nicolas from Evolution all we learn is that Mia is being made ready for a new home, though this one has a Kafkaesque management.
If Earwig has been wrongly described by some as a near-noir body horror then it’s right to say that this film is closer to straight horror genre than any of the other Hadzihalilovic films. Though you might think of David Cronenberg and body explosions it reads as more gothic in sensibility than that. Earwig is remarkable for its moments of extreme violence. But the two attacks with a broken bottle and an attempted strangulation of a cat are shocks that feel alien and disruptive to Hadzihalilovic’s cinema (The beating of the girl in the school in Innocence is mild by comparison and in tone with the film’s depiction of control).
The M.R.James mezzotint story idea (People seeing presences slowly appearing and moving in to a picture of a country mansion) is a good supernatural one but remains undeveloped in Earwig. I’d liked to have learnt more about why Mia throws herself in a lake. And why Celeste briefly appears to be watching this act of suicide. Earwig is powerfully atmospheric but tends to meander rather than integrate its ideas. It’s overlong and perhaps would have worked more successfully as a sombre short film. And although there’s a sense of dreamy ‘passivity’ about the children in Hadzihalilovic’s films I really wanted Mia to do the conventional horror film reaction and scream out terrified at her morose keeper and sinister dental technician.
Earwig is a sealed-in mysterious story that doesn’t, despite its intensely grim and ominous settings achieve a convincing resolution. Celeste’s revenge on Albert for disfiguring her feels insufficient. I was left more concerned about the fate of young Mia: but the script drops that. This dark ride of a journey hits a cul-de-sac and I was left uncertain about Hadzihalilovc’s next project, The Ice Tower. However she returned back on powerful form.
The inspiration for Hadzihalilovic’s The Ice Tower (2025) is Hans Christian Anderson’s iconic fairy tale The Snow Queen. Part of that story concerns a snow queen who demands a human sacrifice. This is narrated off screen and is one of the few remaining components of Anderson’s tale employed by Hadzihalilovic. For her The Ice Tower is not to be a literal adaptation. It’s a coming of age account of a teenage girl, dual-named, Jean/Bianca’s infatuation with an actress playing the snow queen in a film studio, near the mountains of Italy’s South Tyrol, where reality, dream and movie artifice are seamlessly fused. Everything becomes a persuasive re-entering and reimagining of a mythic force. You could say that this is what eventually happens to the little girls in Innocence who leave their supervised environment, reach adolescence and face the trauma of growing up with adult needs and desires. So in The Ice Tower we come round full circle.
The Ice Tower’s remarkable production designs (Julia Irribarria) and superbly atmospheric photography (Jonathan Ricquebourg) keeps 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 wondrous but dangerous, icy place that creates a trance-like state - superbly realised by Lucile Hadzihalilovic and her wonderfully mesmeric direction.
All of Hadzihalilovic’s films are allegories which contain a potential corruption of innocence theme that both attracts and repels within a very personal world. However she does draw on the inspiration of some masters of film in The Ice Tower. There are numerous references to Michael Powel and Alfred Hitchcock. A signalling of the poster of The Red Shoes in the film studio and the snow queen and her potential victim walking to the edge of a snowy precipice recalls Powell’s set recreation of the Himalayas in Black Narcissus. The trouble on set when they are trying to handle a raven mirrors Tippi Hedren fighting off bird attacks in The Birds. And even the whorl in the hair bun of the chilly receptionist, at the teenager’s hotel, evokes the look of Kim Novak in Vertigo.
I love the manner in which The Ice Tower is sometimes shot through the lens of a crystal and this naturally fuses with the light of a film projector, suggesting a multi-faceted playing with our perception of reality. The Ice Tower is a haunting coming of age film which for Bianca/Jeanne ends in deep disappointment. Both women, as real people and not figures of myth, are equally hurt. If the snow queen actress (acted by a splendidly eerie Marion Cotillard) is lonely and depressed then the young woman who’s entered her life is unsure and frightened in the face of the snow queen who is mistakenly chosen as a mother figure.
The snow queen’s subsequent assault on Bianca/Jeanne (played by the outstanding newcomer Clara Pacini) appears not simply lesbian desire but a pathetic cry for help. The women’s vulnerable states clash but cannot be reconciled with authentic affection. In this fairy tale of denied sacrifice and conflicting needs a love story isn’t allowed to unfold. The Ice Tower is almost mainstream compared to Hadzihalilovic’s previous films but set beside most Hollywood fantasy confections its subtly radical.
If for me Innocence still remains Hadzihalilovic’s masterpiece, then Evolution and The Ice Tower tie for her second best film place. Even taking into account the failure of Earwig you have to applaud a quartet of films that have made a significant mark on 21st century cinema. Hadzihalilovic is a visionary auteur who matters.
Severin’s generous box set filled with many extras and two bewitching shorts has to be seen, not only to entrance, but be believed for how film can still deliver subversive magic.
- Alan Price. (This review originally published in London Grip)
