THE ICE TOWER
(Check out Chris Reed’s The Ice Tower movie review, it’s in theaters now. Seen it? Join the conversation with HtN on our Letterboxd Page.)
The Ice Tower is French director Lucile Hadzihalilovic’s fourth feature, after Innocence (2004), Evolution (2015), and Earwig (2021). Based on her body of work, she appears fascinated with the perils of youth, treating the subject through various genres over the years, including the fantastical. In her latest, she follows Jeanne, a teenage runaway who becomes obsessed with an older actress (who returns the interest) starring in a cinematic adaptation of Hans Christian Andersen’s fairy tale “The Snow Queen.”
Filled with evocative imagery—framed in stunning, eerily lit compositions—The Ice Tower is a visually lush (if simultaneously cold), unsettling fable where no dramatic answers come easily. Snow falls, a crow flies, blood drips. If parts of the narrative do not quite resonate beyond their surface symbolism, the result is still often jaw-droppingly beautiful to behold.
As Jeanne, young Clara Pacini goes head-to-head with veteran Marion Cotillard (Annette), who plays Cristina/The Snow Queen, matching her intensity with her own. Jeanne is already haunted by winter landscapes before accidentally crashing Cristina’s movie set. An orphan living in a foster home, she decamps one night from her remote mountain home for a nearby city, breaking into a building for shelter. There, she discovers that her refuge is actually a production studio.
Along the way, she picks up another young woman’s identification, adopting her name, Bianca, as her own. And so both she and her new idol each have alter egos, their personalities occasionally overtaken by doppelgangers. But what exactly do they both want?
That is the question posed in elliptical fashion with increasing urgency as the story progresses. Cristina, who sees in Jeanne a version of herself from years earlier, has desires that alternate between the maternal/sisterly and carnal. We’ve watched Jeanne potentially feel sapphic longing, too, but the ache in her eyes when she gazes upon Cristina seems decidedly more innocent.
Ultimately, despite an overly pat ending wrapped up by the recurring voiceover (which at one point sounds like Cristina instead of the omniscient voice at the opening and close), Hadzihalilovic impresses with her insistence on unspoken secrets. We learn why Jeanne is so drawn to death and its icy embrace, and how this parallels Cristina’s own biography, but much remains hidden, merely hinted at in oblique exchanges about sacrifice and suffering. It’s an effective strategy when it works and never boring even when the script goes off the rails. Which it certainly does, but the onscreen grandeur dazzles enough to make it all seem more meaningful than it may in fact be.
– Christopher Llewellyn Reed (@ChrisReedFilm)
Yellow Veil Pictures; Lucile Hadzihalilovic; The Ice Tower movie review
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