The Ice Tower – Fantastic Fest review

★★★★

Lucile Hadžihalilović delivers a transportive, seductive dream of ice and illusion, where enchantment holds fast even as narrative thins like Alpine air over nearly two hours.

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From its first moments, The Ice Tower lulls us into a trance. Lucile Hadžihalilović’s vision is dreamy, seductive, even hypnagogic, like drifting under ether. That narcotic quality is its greatest strength, but also its limit: the spell holds, though perhaps not quite strongly enough for the 1h57m running time.

Jeanne (Clara Pacini), a teenage orphan obsessed with the fairy tale The Snow Queen, slips from her alpine foster home and hitchhikes through the night. In the snowy day she sneaks into a building to hunker down in a quiet crevice. In the morning she wakes from uneasy dreams to find she is backstage on the set of a film version of her favourite tale. She meets Cristina (Marion Cotillard), a celebrated actress playing the monarch of ice, steaks another girl’s identity, and insinuates herself as an extra. Fascination grows in both directions. Soon the boundary between production and reality frays, and the two women appear to fold into one another, each gazing at a future or past self.

Marion Cotillard is icily resplendent, regal and remote, while Clara Pacini proves a quietly magnetic discovery. Their performances are pared back, deliberately kept in check, but within that restraint something potent takes shape. Cotillard recognises her own past in Pacini, who in turn glimpses her future in Cotillard. What begins as mirroring becomes transference – or maybe transfusion. Cotillard and Pacini circle each other in a spell of yearning and vampiric allure.

Desire here is not gentle but extractive. Cristina feeds on Jeanne’s awe, Jeanne is hollowed by her devotion, and the relationship plays as initiation as much as possession. Hadžihalilović has cited The Spirit of the Beehive as a guiding influence, and the kinship is evident: both films show how cinema’s enchantment can remake the world while draining those who give themselves over too completely.

The structure intensifies this pull. A film within a dream, within another dream, inside the film we are watching unfolds like an ice crystal refracting multiple realms at once. This is a film of possessive gazes, with Andersen’s cursed mirror reborn as the camera lens, a device that distorts and magnifies in equal measure, whether flattering or damning. Hadžihalilović captures the shimmer of enchantment, but the dark enchantment of false realms and magazine spreads.

Gaspar Noé, in a delightful wig, is good value as the director inside the film, while Jonathan Ricquebourg’s cinematography gives the images a frozen stillness that makes the spell convincing. Hypnotic cinema that sustains its frozen charm with austere beauty and chilling restraint.

The Ice Tower is a seductive dream of ice and desire, not fragile but commanding in its quiet register and crystalline glory. It’s an entrancing gasp of desire and illusion, and though things are stretched as thinly as alpine air over its two hours, it will bewitch those who are able to sink into its glacial spell.

The Ice Tower played at Fantastic Fest in Austin, TX