The Ice Tower

1970s, in the High Alps. Fifteen-year-old runaway orphan Jeanne (Clara Pacini) finds shelter in a movie studio where a film adaptation of her favourite fairy tale, Hans Christian Anderson’s The Snow Queen, is being shot. From her hiding spot behind the stage, Jeanne becomes enthralled with the film’s mysterious and exacting star, Cristina van den Berg (Marion Cotillard). When Jeanne is mistaken for an extra on set, Cristina takes a shine to her. But cold is the heart of the Snow Queen, and she demands sacrifices from those who love her.

This spellbinding fantasy drama from director Lucile Hadžihalilović combines an experimental arthouse aesthetic with stunning wintry landscapes to paint a dark, oneiric world that flows freely between Jeanne’s tactile reality and the Snow Queen’s cinematic fantasy realm. Up-and-comer Clara Pacini shines in her delicate portrayal of teenage vulnerability, while Academy Award–winning actress Marion Cotillard brings masterful nuance to her depiction of the ice-cold screen queen. Winner of the Silver Bear for Outstanding Artistic Contribution at Berlinale.

Darkly allusive… Enigmatic and ethereal.

Jeannette Catsoulis, New York Times

Femininity exerts a powerfully unsettling pull in the work of Lucile Hadžihalilović, a French auteur who’s never made a film of such coruscating, crystalline beauty as The Ice Tower, a hypnotic meditation on the enchantment that develops between an impressionable teenage runaway and the imperious film actress whose set she stumbles first onto, then into.

Isaac Feldbert, rogerebert.com

The Ice Tower is as fragile and delicate as a snowflake, as disorientating and mysterious as adolescence, and as dark as a winter’s night.

5/5, Anton Bitel, Little White Lies