Water — or, to put it more precisely, the inherent fluidity of it — is a central motif of freedom in all of Lucile Hadžihalilović’s films. Whatever time our adolescent characters spend floating inside it sharply contrasts with the otherwise rigidly systematic ways in which parents (as strict teachers, or vice versa) force conformity upon them in her first two films, Innocence (2004) and Évolution (2015). The camerawork and editing, too, feel considerably looser in these sequences than the Haneke-ian control that sets the oppressively austere tone of these two films. Free-floating becomes a quiet form of rebellion against rules and regulations, then, a momentary respite from the otherwise cloistered existence that our characters are forced to lead. In Earwig (2021) — Hadžihalilović’s most narratively dense film — water bodies like lakes and seas aren’t nearly as critical an element of the mise-en-scène as they are in the director’s first two films. But the very (absurd) conceit of the film is about a middle-aged man who must daily fashion new dentures out of ice for a girl with no teeth. Every day begins with him forcibly fitting these dentures into her mouth, but ends with that ice having melted into a puddle of water: try as he might, then, our protagonist can’t forever exercise his frigid control over this girl’s autonomy. Everything and everyone — especially the children in Hadžihalilović’s films — has a melting point.
Except, perhaps, in her latest feature film, The Ice Tower. The title clearly alludes to this frigidness, and the narrative only confirms it: unlike her previous films, in which adolescents, to varying degrees, wanted to float against the tide, our protagonist here, the 15-year-old orphan Jeanne (Clara Pacini), most definitely — almost defiantly — doesn’t. She wants to remain frozen in her naïve submission to Hans Christian Andersen’s fairytale of The Snow Queen, so much so that the filmic (re)production of it, which she eventually becomes a part of, takes over her sense and semblance of reality. Every word — coldly whispered by the Snow Queen of the filmic production, Cristina (Marion Cotillard, appearing larger than life but giving an oddly pared-down performance) — echoes loudly for Jeanne both when she’s acting beside her in the film-within-the-film and outside of it. Jeanne, like most lost adolescents, looks for any form of acceptance to not feel like she’s free-floating through life. So, she understandably buys into the mythic tale and image of the Snow Queen and never wishes to let it go.
The critical issue with The Ice Tower, however, is that it never buys into Jeanne’s consistently confused subjectivity. Hadžihalilović’s previous films have been entirely committed to embodying our characters’ almost frustratingly irresolvable sense of mystery. Each of them dropped us in media res into their magnificently strange worlds, whose rules and regulations seemed arbitrary at first but gradually took on a systematic shape. In The Ice Tower, however, Hadžihalilović’s exquisitely composed images are overly exacting and over-insistently clear, making it the only project in her filmography that impresses without ever genuinely feeling expressive. Repeatedly throughout the film, Hadžihalilović pierces through Jeanne’s vivid imagination of The Snow Queen with such directorial precision that Jeanne’s collapsing sense of reality never blurs with the ongoing filmic reproduction of Hans Christian Andersen’s fairytale: there’s always a clear (and obvious) distinction between the real and the artifice. Take, for instance, a critical sequence involving Cotillard’s operatic entry shot as The Snow Queen. Even before we can feel the grand sweep of Jeanne seeing Cristina in the role of The Snow Queen for the first time, Hadžihalilović punctures its haunting allure by having the director of the film-within-the-film (played by Gaspar Noé, Hadžihalilović’s partner) suddenly yelling, “CUT.” Similarly, the film-within-the film’s production design — mostly composed in long wide shots to emphasize the corridors’ crumminess more than the extravagantly constructed set of the titular Ice Tower — stands as such a stark contrast to Jeanne’s “boundless and majestic” imagination of The Snow Queen that it becomes increasingly difficult to believe why Jeanne herself hasn’t snapped out of her illusion of The Snow Queen. We’re never really with her, then, throughout the majority of The Ice Tower; we simply follow her story from a distance, observing how imagemakers and imagemaking seduce her into accepting myth(making) as her reality.
In all too brief moments, however, Hadžihalilovic breaks free from this sterile deconstruction of imagemaking (and consumption) to remind us just how hypnotically alluring her filmmaking can be when entirely committed to collapsing the distance between the viewer and the screen. The pre-credits sequence and its matching closing one are, far and away, the most mesmerizing sequences in The Ice Tower because they entirely commit to embodying an adolescent child’s fragile and fractured subjectivity. There’s none of the sharp clarity that otherwise defines the rest of the film. Instead, these sequences are freeform cascading montages of blurry images projected as shimmering shards of white and deep-blue light, each containing either a child’s “boundless and majestic” vision of The Snow Queen, a hazy recollection of their past experiences, or a fleeting premonition of their future. There’s no way to delineate one from the other because that’s Jeanne’s experience of reality (and its blending with artifice). This formally unfettered representation of confusion — always fluid, always elusive — is what’s lacking from the rest of The Ice Tower; it’s all impressively controlled, all right, but barring these two memorably mesmerizing sequences, hardly moving.
DIRECTOR: Lucile Hadžihalilović; CAST: Marion Cotillard, Clara Pacini, August Diehl, Lila-Rose Gilberti; DISTRIBUTOR: Yellow Veil Pictures; IN THEATERS: October 3; RUNTIME: 1 hr. 58 min.
Originally published as part of London Film Festival 2025 — Dispatch 4.
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