The realm of the snow queen appears more as an optical deception than as a tangible structure. In the light breaking of a crystal, the icy landscape sparkles as a distorted shape and in the middle of it this ghostly white tower, in which the ruler is supposed to live. The French author filmmaker Lucile Hadžihalilović takes her audience in “The ice tower” Another time in a nightmare, spooky -waving fairy tale world after making a name for yourself with cryptic works such as “Evolution” or finally “Earwig” at least in the international festival scene. Again she tells a coming-of-age story that is looking for fantastic and surreal elements for her very own, unmistakable poetics.
In “The Eisturm”, the director dares to go into the dark scentding -looking illustration pictures and illusion machines of cinema and film production itself. And maybe this art form has less sublime and enlightening itself than you would like to persuade yourself, but only leads down deeper into the abysses of man. So how fitting: the introduction to the world of the film leads here over the ground over an interrupted window. The film set can only be reached via the descent into a dark, damp basement.
Marion Cotillard as Cristina as a snow queen
In the 1970s, a teenager named Jeanne (Clara Pacini), who flees from the children's home in the mountains, gets into this mysterious world, hitchhiking into the valley and secretly spends the night behind the scenes of a film production. As soon as she falls, she falls asleep, accepts “the ice tower” fantastic features: snow falls from the ceiling, strange light penetrates through walls and cracks.
Here you also appear an actress: Cristina (Marion Cotillard) plays the snow queen in a remake of the famous fairy tale. Jeanne decays her magic, will be part of the filming and soon the boundaries between art and life, guards and dreams turn …
A film set as a ghostly fairy tale
It is not easy to see this film. Lucile Hadžihalilović remains faithful to her brittle, heavily decelerated style, in which one sometimes has difficulty to make an action at all, which is always supposed to mean that in the films of this artist. Anyone who first draws themselves into the distinctive, dark mood and the atmospheric-showered images will feel “the ice tower” as just as impressive as Hadžihalilović's predecessor.
Hadžihalilović is a highly talented formalist, probably one of the most fascinating ever. And so she turns the mechanisms and phantasms of her medium back and forth, shaking them through like a kaleidoscope that delimits its own fiction with always new tilting images.
Jeanne (Clara Pacini) also meets August Diehl in the new world as a personal doctor from actress Cristina.
She sends her young protagonist not only through the labyrinthian corridors of the film industry, but also to the cinema and the room, which only enables its projection. And so Hadžihalilović lets her audience look out of the cinema into another cinema hall in which canvas, spectators and the scenes of the film become one.
Even the director on the set can hardly tame this ominous and magical transition room. He is certainly not played by accident by Gaspar Noé (“irreversible”), the long -time partner of Lucile Hadžihalilović, who in his experimental film “Lux Aeterna” also devoted himself to the nightmarish excesses of the film business between human cruelty and medial, misleading miracle. Both films can be seen as stylistically fundamentally different and still combined works.
A fairy tale between reality and illusion
In Hadžihalilović's “Eisturm”, the confrontation with art not only follows an uninhibited Cinephilen, but also a childlike logic that does not distinguish between fiction and reality. Although they look directly into the gearbox of their construction, touch the painted backdrops and hide in the costume foundation! There are still discomfort and astonishment, with which one is given the deceptive loss of reality, which is increasingly opposed in this film.
If Jeanne reads the fairy tale of the snow queen to another girl, there is no question that the miraculous exists in the world. It then sloshes more and more to the pictures of the film and is only gradually given breaks and open questions.
Jeanne becomes part of a film shoot – but what is fiction, what fantastic?
With Marion Cotillard (“The Dark Knight Rises”) Hadžihalilović has found a suitable line -up for the Auratically cool snow queen, in which you never get completely smart until the end, which is for a shape, which she really has in the shield. Is she actually a sorceress who fryks the crow on the set so that she peppered a young statistical? Or is it simply a socially incompatible acting diva that makes life hell everyone else? Everything seems to be about it. She sees and hears everything, the young statistics are threatening to hear. Those who adore them have to give up themselves.
For Jeanne, it becomes an icon, the dazzling and equally unreachable model, which appears ghostly in the scenes. Sometimes only as a costume and empty shell between death and life. “The ice tower” also becomes a film about the spectacle. The head cinema continues in front of yawning canvas and Jeanne tries in the cinema seat to emulate her idol. She smokes the half -glossed cigarette of the diva and takes its attitude. She has already accepted a new identity and pretends to be Bianca after finding the handbag of the young woman she had already observed on the street.
A victim for the queen
Later, when the two women of different generations get closer, the one -off trauma and mental pain of the two are washed up. Cristina as a mother replacement, can that be good? The kiss of the snow queen is already an icy seduction in Hans Christian Andersen's fairy tale – everything is getting worse with Hadžihalilović! Here, an obsessive dynamic grows, which, in addition to care and admiration, also assumes abusive, exploiting, at some point in a literary forms of death.
The director and her co -author Geoff Cox take up the basic motif of many fairy tales: the history of a child who has to survive in a cruel world alone lurking on every corner. It longs for freedom and security and knows that both are also associated with fancies and fantasy folds, which only reveal their whole behind there, where everything is almost too late. In this respect, Lucile Hadžihalilović's cinema turns out to be not only confusing, but also educational, despite all the hallucinating so -called so -called so -called so -called so -called so -called so -called so -called so -called so -called so -called so -called so -called so -called so -called so -called so -called so -called so -called so -called so -called so -called so -called so -called so -called so -called so -called so -called so -called so -called so -called so -called so -called so -called so -called so -called so -called so -called so -called so -called so -called so -called.
Conclusion: “The ice tower” is another bulky, puzzling, but highly atmospheric fairy tale album by Lucile Hadžihalilović about false idols, the delusion of the cinemas and the search of an adolescent for a clue in life.
We saw “the ice tower” as part of the Berlinale 2025, where it was shown as part of the official competition.