‘The Ice Tower’ review: Marion Cotillard stars in Lucile Hadzihalilovic’s Snow Queen re-take

Dir: Lucile Hadzihalilovic. Fr/Ger. 2025. 118mins

Numerous variations and appropriations – amongst them Disney’s Frozen – have diluted the sheer weirdness of Hans Christian Andersen’s fairy story The Snow Queen, a story of fine and evil that can be one younger woman’s investigative quest for a lacking boyfriend who has come underneath the affect of an older lady. In her ravishingly shot fourth function, set within the mid Seventies, Lucile Hadzihalilovic takes the boy out of the image. Informed by the allusive body of a feminine teenage runaways’s encounter with a film star diva performed by Marion Cotillard, who’s taking pictures a brand new model of The Snow Queen, this can be a story of womanhood at a crossroads: its two characters someway develop into one, a earlier than and an after, slowly circling, testing, and taking inventory of each other.

A narrative of womanhood at a crossroads

Since Hadzihalilovic and Cotillard first teamed up within the director’s revelatory first function, Innocence, in 2004, the actress has discovered international stardom whereas the filmmaker has ploughed her personal idiosyncratic route in two different fantasy-tinged dramatic options; Evolution (2015) and Earwig (2021). Hadzihalilovic is a director who refuses to compromise her very distinctive imaginative and prescient and that’s the case right here, even when The Ice Tower, which bows in Berlin Competitors, is her largest movie up to now; totally stunning in each body with a breakout lead efficiency by younger French actress Clara Pacini.

To name The Ice Tower ‘typical’ could be one thing of a stretch, however there may be not one of the wanton oddness of, say, Earwig. There a woman had precise enamel of ice; right here, the icy coronary heart of Cotillard’s jaded, broken film star Cristina is extra metaphorical. With its lengthy, dusty, amplified silences that sound just like the run-out groove of a vinyl report, its glacial environment, theme and pacing, The Ice Tower is, paradoxically, each Hadzihalilovic’s first stab at breaking out into mainstream exhibition berths and never a completely simple promote. Festive season counter-programming provides a method out of the deadlock.

With eyes like darkish swimming pools and the poise of a ballerina (a poster we glimpse for Powell and Pressburger’s The Purple Footwear nods at an affect right here), Pacini’s Jeanne is clearly the misfit within the poor mountain household whose rustic eating desk she awkwardly joins close to the beginning of the motion. Quickly sufficient she’s run away over snowed-in Alpine passes, missed solely by a a lot youthful sister with whom she shares a love of Andersen’s celebrated fable. Jeanne takes along with her solely a handful of agate beads which are, as any fairy story fan will know, helpful forex when on a quest.

Her vacation spot, after a close to assault whereas hitch-hiking, is a close-by city (truly Bolzano, in Italy’s Sud Tirol area), the place, drained and hungry, she finally finds a sleep area in what seems to be a semi-abandoned constructing. Quickly sufficient, Jeanne will uncover that she has slipped into the behind-the-scenes interstices of a movie set. And the movie, starring Cotillard’s tough, imperious diva, is The Snow Queen.

Initially seen by slits within the backdrop, this movie within the making is forbidden territory that Jeanne progressively slips into, in ways in which require a sure magical-realist suspension of disbelief. She finds work first as an additional after which because the stand-in for the younger Gerda of Andersen’s story, performed by a tearful actress upon whom Cristina has positioned a curse by way of a bady-wrangled (and later badly-mangled) crow. August Diehl turns up as Max, a caddish, melancholy previous buddy of Cristina’s who introduces himself to Jeanne as her physician – a grown-up method of claiming ‘pusher’. The director’s accomplice Gaspar Noe performs Dino, the briefly-glimpsed director of the film-within-a-film, that we wrestle to situate in The Ice Tower’s Seventies setting primarily based on what we see right here – in all honesty it appears to be like extra Lucile Hadzihalilovic than, say, Dario Argento.

Jeanne is one thing of a magpie – she steals a many-faceted crystal drop from the Snow Queen’s gown, and even assumes the identify, Bianca, of a girl whose purse she finds on the streets of this chilly, rationalist city, with its streets and piazzas straight out of a Giorgio De Chirico portray. A lot of her rapport with Cristina, whose spell she progressively falls underneath, is made up of silent glances. Each phrase mentioned – as when Jeanne, in Cristina’s dressing room, narrates a trauma involving her beginning mom – is a danger.

Together with her steely, judgmental eyes, Cristina appears a monster solid out of the terrors and self-consciousness of adolescence – a transitional age that’s Hadzihalilovic’s abiding theme. The form-shifting refractions of this time of life are given visible kind right here in a collection of dreamy ice-crystal montages set to the music of French composer Olivier Messiaen.