Writers: Lucile Hadžihalilović and Geoff Cox
Director: Lucile Hadžihalilović
With her latest film, The Ice Tower, Lucile Hadžihalilović once again conjures a hermetically sealed world of cinematic fantasy, fitting between fairy tale, horror, and melodrama. Like her previous gothic horror Earwig, the plot—which loosely takes its inspiration from Hans Christian Andersen’s The Snow Queen—unfolds not in an entirely recognisable reality but in an emotional one, and refashions fairy-tale elements into something more internal, sparse, and disquieting— a distorted, dreamlike fable that teases out the latent queer overtones of Andersen’s classic tale. The backstage setting, a film-within-a-film, adds a seductive layer of self-reflexivity.
The uncanny and heightened perils of adolescence, gender, and sexuality have been central to Hadžihalilović’s work since her extraordinary debut Innocence. Here too, the transition between childhood and adulthood becomes a journey of desire, repression, and possible transformation. It is a snow-swept France in the 1970s when Jeanne (Clara Pacini), an emotionally withdrawn orphan, drifts into the night without much explanation. She finds solace and shelter in a film studio where an adaptation of the Andersen fairy tale is being shot. There, posing as an extra and slipping into another identity, she—like us—becomes entranced by the lead actress, Christina (a commanding Marion Cotillard), whose beauty and volatility dominate everyone around her.
Christina is demanding, prone to sudden fits of temper, and seems to hold a strange, almost supernatural power. An immediate gravitational pull forms between the two women, at once maternal and faintly erotic, even obsessively dangerous, as Jeanne is slowly drawn into the inner world of the wintry film sets and its magnetic star.
The director turns reflection itself—through mirrors, ice, or the fog of light from a projector—into something with the power of transformation, but also of entrapment. There’s a lovely tactility in the film’s use of gleaming, shifting surfaces that hold and repress as much as they reveal, offering shimmering portals of possibility.
The relationship between Christina and Jeanne unfolds ambiguously and symbiotically as fantasy becomes indiscernible from reality. What exactly does this beautiful film star see in the troubled Jeanne, her ‘lucky charm’—and what are her intentions when she murmurs, “We are joined together”? There is a sinister sense that she is directing and moulding Jeanne, seeing her as both a subject and a mirror of herself.
It’s a gorgeous and cine-rich tapestry, where the shadow of Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger’s The Red Shoes looms large. The poster for that cinematic classic—another tale about art, entrapment, and power, and itself inspired by an Andersen story—is even winkingly half-glimpsed in one shot. Keen-eyed cinephiles will also spot another cinematic provocateur, Gaspar Noé—Hadžihalilović’s longtime collaborator and partner—in a brief entertaining cameo as the director of the film-within-the-film.
For all its potent visual richness and swirl of abstract themes, there’s always the risk of narrative or emotional elusiveness, but the film is anchored by Cotillard’s intense and hypnotic presence. The Ice Tower is another mysterious puzzle from a director that continues to defy classification
The Ice Tower is screening at the BFI London Film Festival 2025 from 8-19 October.
