Reviewed by Ian Long
Dir: Lucile Hadžihalilović | Fantasy Thriller 2025.
Lucile Hadžihalilović specialises in creating private worlds where strange things happen: interior realms with their own rules and codes, enclosed and off-limits to outsiders.
Her first film, Innocence (2004), was a rite of passage set in a heightened, oneiric girls’ school. It took its characters through various tests, symbolic death, and finally exploded into a joyous rebirth which said everything about the coming of new powers and possibilities. And it proclaimed an exciting new female heir to the legacy of Surrealism.
Hadžihalilović’s two subsequent films were intriguing and beautifully crafted, but I didn’t find them as gripping as her debut. Evolution (2015) was too much a male-centred recapitulation of Innocence, while the lack of narrative interest in the young girl at the centre of the English-language Earwig (2022) added to its general sense of airless impenetrability. The film now feels like a misstep.
My fears that The Ice Tower would be even more abstruse and desiccated than Earwig quickly subsided on viewing the film, which returns Hadžihalilović to her core strength: full and blissful immersion in someone else’s dream. But that’s not to say the story is in any way jolly.
It centres on unhappy teenager Jeanne, who is preoccupied not only by the Snow Queen fairytale she reads to younger sister Rose, but by the forbidding, all-too-real icy mountains which tower over the village where she lives.
Jeanne runs away from home with no apparent plan, taking little except her prized possession, a string of chunky beads whose significance later becomes clear. She steals I.D. papers from Bianca, a glamorous but unfriendly girl she meets at an ice rink and, needing somewhere to sleep, breaks into a mysterious building whose purpose will change her life. It’s a film studio.
Hadžihalilović herself is clearly in love with film, and she likes to drop clues to her cinematic influences. The Ice Tower takes place in a town named Alpenville, calling Jean Luc Godard to mind. At one stage we see a poster for The Red Shoes. And Jeanne’s tumble down a frozen mountainside, in which she hits her head on a rock, is reminiscent of the stony snowball in Les Enfants Terribles (Cocteau’s spirit looms large over the film).
And Hadžihalilović helpfully set out twelve of her cinematic inspirations for The Ice Tower in a Variety interview: a roll-call of landmarks, from The Spirit of the Beehive to The Birds via Veronika Voss and Daughters of Darkness. But more than any of the director’s picks, the film reminded me of Richard Rush’s Stunt Man (1980), where another powerless interloper is drawn into the world of a film shoot and finds the boundaries between reality, dream and fiction fatefully blurred.
In both films, potentially malign fantasy spills out from the movie set and into the lives and world beyond. And in both, a hapless protagonist falls under the spell of a powerful and charismatic older person. In Stunt Man it’s Peter O’Toole’s megalomaniac director Eli Cross; in The Ice Tower, it’s Cristina (Marion Cotillard), the shimmering, self-involved star of the studio’s current production, whose cold capriciousness makes her perfect casting for the Snow Queen of Jeanne’s imagination.
The Ice Tower begins and ends with another Hadžihalilović hallmark, a screen filled with abstract shapes: in this case, soft-focus, slowly twirling snow crystals. Perhaps the best testament to the spell cast by the film is that, rather than dashing out at the end of the action, most of the case-hardened critics at my screening stayed on through the end titles to catch the last of the icy swirls and to hear the final strains of the glacial music accompanying them. @_I_a_n_l_o_n_g_
THE ICE TOWER | in UK cinemas 21 November 2025