The Ice Tower

Of all the directors who have had the mixed blessing of being compared to that incomparable filmmaker, Lucile Hadžihalilović might be worthiest — and it’s precisely because, unlike so many of her peers, she doesn’t consciously imitate him. She simply makes movies in her own idiosyncratic way, always with compelling and surreal results. Her latest is another vibe-forward mood piece whose plot you could summarize in a few sentences but whose strange intricacies you could puzzle over for hours.

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The ‘70s-era narrative concerns 16-year-old Jeanne (newcomer Clara Pacini) escaping from her children’s home in the mountains to the wintry valley below where, looking for a place to sleep, she wanders onto a sound stage. It’s there that she first lays eyes on Cristina (Marion Cotillard), the icy thespian playing the eponymous role in an adaptation of Hans Christian Andersen’s The Snow Queen. Aloof, beautiful, and mysterious — in other words, everything a movie star should be — Cristina casts a spell with her gaze alone, though her sparkly, snow-white gown and crown certainly add to her allure. Jeanne is instantly taken by her, as will be many viewers, and contrives a way to be cast as an extra on the film.

“The queen is so demanding,” Cristina says of her character, “a real monster.” Cotillard is at her most ethereal in what’s essentially a dual role as both actress and monarch; she’s delivered more emotional performances, but never appeared as enigmatic as she does here. As Cristina takes on more and more traits of her character, so too does the movie come to feel like the fairy tale at its center. The Queen demands a sacrifice from all who love her, we’re told, and in its way so does The Ice Tower. You have to give it not only your time but your active, undivided attention. Its unhurried (some might say glacial) pace won’t be the reward many are seeking.

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Cristina’s attention is reward enough for Jeanne. She sees a bit of herself in the mercurial starlet, but also a kind of surrogate mother; read whatever Freudian analysis you like into the vaguely psychosexual nature of their growing bond. There’s a bit of Mulholland Drive’s Rita and Betty to them, as well as overt Hitchcock references by the film-within-a-film’s director (Gaspar Noé, the fellow filmmaker married to Hadžihalilović).

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He claims his next project will be a Hitchcockian thriller, and his current production features a crow with a nasty habit of attacking whichever stand-in is unlucky enough to be sharing a scene with it. That includes Jeanne, whose quest to win over Cristina often comes at the expense of her own wellbeing.

You have to give it not only your time but your active, undivided attention.

There’s no trail of breadcrumbs back to the orphanage, no way out of her increasingly dreamlike ordeal. Sometimes when she finds herself on set after hours, it’s as though she’s departed the real world and entered that of the fairy tale — a more comforting place, perhaps, but one fraught with its own dangers. The craggy, snow-capped mountains in the distance are foreboding yet inviting, which might be said of The Ice Tower itself.

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No other filmmaker today operates quite like Hadžihalilović, whose inscrutable oeuvre dazzles and bewilders in equal measure. Her most recent film, 2021’s intoxicating Earwig, was about a little girl whose teeth are made of ice; the one before that, 2015’s Evolution, was art-house horror at its most amorphous. The Ice Tower would be out of place in any other director’s filmography, which is to say that it’s perfectly at home in Hadžihalilović’s — especially as it reunites her with Cotillard, who starred in her debut feature Innocence more than 20 years ago. There’s a fine line between mesmeric and pretentious, atmospheric and boring, but Hadžihalilović’s steady hand ensures that The Ice Tower always falls on the right side of it.