If there is a filmmaker whose work can be described as “elemental cinema,” that’s Lucile Hadžihalilović. It’s easy to chronicle her 2015 film Evolution as fluvial for its many water (and underwater) scenes, but also how its rhythmic flow steers the mysteries of a post-humanist plot. One might say that Innocence is earthy with a soil that’s dry––there, the woods are where secrets are concealed––and the San Sebastian Special Jury Prize winner Earwig is as ethereal as it is enigmatic. The way Hadžihalilović borrows from elements serves to alchemize the images we see onscreen, lacing them with a thin veil of unknowability. Yet their meaning is never fully out of reach; these are coming-of-age stories at their core. Hadžihalilović’s newest film, The Ice Tower, was billed as her most accessible work yet, borrowing from a source more familiar than she has before: Hans Christian Andersen’s fairytale “The Snow Queen.”
It’s made explicit, too, by voiceover accompanying a spectacular opening shot of a vast ice-capped landscape, a tiny village in the mountains, and the small figure of a girl plowing through. Jeanne (Clara Pacini) is a teenager with a bob cut and frugal look, the oldest in a foster home and thus the bedtime storyteller. In what’s nearly a ritual, she recounts the Snow Queen’s enchanting beauty and her demands to surrender her heart to an icy embrace––a doomed, romantic kind of togetherness. But even such obvious foreshadowing cannot square the script (written by Hadžihalilović and Geoff Cox again) into something predictable.
Jeanne is the first Hadžihalilović protagonist to escape her confines in the very beginning: one morning she simply leaves for the city (the chronotopes are murky, but we’re somewhere in 1970s France), pulled by a pure desire to experience life. There is little conflict underscoring her decision, which must mean she is still to come of age. Jeanne is impressionable––she’s taken by a group of teenagers floating over a small ice rink, especially a pirouetting brunette whose handbag she will later come to possess. Bianca is what Jeanne starts calling herself, and no wonder: the name means “white” in Italian, evoking Snow White (Biancaneve). The most intriguing part about Jeanne / Bianca’s life beyond the foster home is that the basement she decides to bunk up in turns out to be a film set––not just any, but one of a gloriously stylish film adaptation of “The Snow Queen” where the title character is played by a well-respected diva film star, Cristina van den Berg (notice the mountain in her last name!), herself portrayed by Marion Cotillard.
The two worlds––the one in Jeanne’s imagination and the film-within-the-film––are always dangerously close. Some will call this surrealism, an epithet that’s been used time and again to describe Hadžihalilović’s approach to world-building, but it’s much more intricate. She doesn’t do hierarchies, even if the grown-ups in her films insist on them so much. There is no “superior” reality; even the quasi-magical or inexplicable events enrich what’s already happening in the “real” world of the protagonist. That’s true for The Ice Tower as well, even though it has to be said that cinema itself (technological first in Hadžihalilović’s work so far) is portrayed with the allure of a fairytale.
Whether in costume as the Snow Queen or in her robe as actress Cristina van den Berg, Cotillard is always breathtaking. No coincidence: identification between Jeanne and the viewer intensifies with every scene, Cristina’s allure only increasing as the film progresses. The Ice Tower is magnificent to look at, so textured and lavish at the same time; the smooth work of cinematographer Jonathan Ricquebourg (The Taste of Things) ensures longer takes are as glacial as winter terrain.
Hadžihalilović has formed an homage to cinema as an enchantment-casting machine. Alongside Jeanne, who steps in as a supposed extra to then be promoted to stand-in and secondary character by Cristina herself, we peek behind the scenes, seeing the shoot and everything between takes (including the drama and inarticulate tensions). Yet the mise-en-scène is always a stand-out: there is no “ugly” place in The Ice Tower, a film where nature, the dailies, and the film shoot are equally mesmerizing, no space that is less-than-magical when everything is equally exciting for Jeanne herself.
While Andersen’s tale features a cursed mirror distorting everything reflected in it, The Ice Tower uses mirrors, ice, and glass to build kaleidoscopic versions of the Queen’s kingdom and Jeanne’s perception of the world. There’s something elemental, too, in how Hadžihalilović uses those reflective surfaces without dwelling too much on the artifice they evoke. A few times, the camera itself turns into a reflective device the way a look through textured glass brought an eerie new perspective in Earwig; it’s in this gesture that Hadžihalilović invites us to allow ourselves enchantment, well knowing that the world is still a place we ought to leave behind.
The Ice Tower premiered at the 2025 Berlinale and will be released by Yellow Veil Pictures.