‘The Ice Tower’ Review: Marion Cotillard Casts a Spell in a Shivery Cinematic Hypnosis from Lucile Had?ihalilovi?
Gorgeous and glacial in equally frosty measure, Lucile Had?ihalilovi?’s “The Ice Tower” is all art-film-only vibes, a wintry 1970s fairy tale about a screen actress who casts a potentially dangerous spell. It’s anchored by an actress, Marion Cotillard, who has one of the great faces, and a classical sophistication with a glamorous, out-of-reach noirish beauty that pairs wonderfully with a creature cut out of Hans Christian Andersen: amorous, elusive, but wounded.
Shot gorgeously in France and Northern Italy by cinematographer Jonathan Ricquebourg — this is truly the most visually astonishing movie so far to premiere at the 2025 Berlinale — “The Ice Tower” will prove an uneasy catch for commercially minded audiences looking for anything more than a mood in feature form. But those wanting to be hypnotized by cinema, as this film really does put you in a state of trance, will enjoy a unique experience from the director of “Innocence” and “Evolution,” and wife and creative partner of Gaspar Noé, who cameos in this film as a director running a ’70s film set production led by an enigmatic star.
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Had?ihalilovi? and screenwriter Geoff Cox graft the basics of Hans Christian Andersen’s “The Snow Queen” into a less mythic but more contemporary story about the power and pull of artifice. Newcomer Clara Pacini stars as Jeanne, a 16-year-old orphaned after the death of her mother, the only memory of which exists in the form of a handful of beads she purloined from the mother’s dead body. She’s whisked off to an orphanage high away in the mountains — and where, exactly, “The Ice Tower” is set never really matters, as even though it’s set in the ’70s, the setting feels firmly out of time and place. Jeanne, though, ends up running away, first stumbling upon an ice rink where a woman named Bianca is skating to “It’s Five O’Clock” by Aphrodite’s Child. Or is it actually set in the ’70s, or just a cinematic space meant to evoke the time period?
Jeanne, whom we are meant to understand as prudish and just a bit sheltered with a face whose inscrutability suggests she hasn’t seen much of life at all, is struck by the skater and the sexuality she potentially wields. Like Had?ihalilovi?’s 2004 “Innocence,” set at an all-girls boarding school where the new students are brought in inside coffins, “The Ice Tower” is at its heart (and not that it has much of one) a coming-of-age story about female sexuality and agency. So when Jeanne, who’s now going by Bianca, accidentally winds up in a film studio where a production of Hans Christian Andersen’s “The Snow Queen” is taking place, it’s hard to tell whether her fascination for Cristina (Cotillard) is more sexual or mother-daughter. Perhaps it can be both.
Cristina and Jeanne’s first introduction is an eerily staged scene that announces what a hall of mirrors “The Ice Tower” will be, and how appropriate given that the framing device of Hans Christian Andersen’s tale is in fact around a mirror, which here Had?ihalilovi? utilizes the camera in place of. Jeanne peers through an aperture in the wall where she’s fallen asleep to see a floating, ethereal Cristina as snow falls down upon her, only for that floating figure to be just an actress, that snowfall to be fake movie set stuff, as a director calls cut and what Jeanne was actually watching was a film take.
What follows is a perverse folie à deux between Cristina/The Snow Queen and Jeanne/Bianca, whose relationship borders on erotic but hovers closer somewhere to a mentorship, at first, once Cristina starts taking Jeanne under her wing, and Jeanne upstages another one of the young extras on set. Their relationship never crystallizes into anything concrete, which keeps “The Ice Tower” firmly in the realm of moody dream space rather than anything melodramatic that’s even slightly giving in terms of emotion.
At one point, Cristina tells Jeanne that they can be together forever, or leave tomorrow and never look back, but Jeanne chickens out on the offer while they stare off over a cliff, putting a sense of doom over where their dynamic is headed. At another, Cristina invites Jeanne to a drink only to ghost her on the promise entirely, leaving Jeanne standing alone in the cold and starting to sense the delusion she’s caught over how much this woman might actually be interested in her. That their relationship takes a turn towards sexual assault recalls an earlier moment in the film where Jeanne is picked up on the side of the road by a man in a van who promises to drop her off “after a brief detour.” The world of adults is a dangerous one.
In terms of mood and tone and its own artifices and surfaces, “The Ice Tower” is a stunner, shot with Cinemascope framing that brings a hugely dramatic power to many long, languid close-ups, especially as Cristina watches the dailies of her movie. A soundtrack created with the ondes Martenot, an electronic instrument that sounds much like a theremin, creates a dreamlike spell that only adds to the film’s trance-making allure. The understated performances and coolly detached, shivery hypnotic vibes of this film won’t be for anyone looking for a story, but “The Ice Tower” casts a creepy spell that lingers and even deepens in the mind long after it’s over. As only the best spells do.
Grade: B+
“The Ice Tower” premiered at the 2025 Berlin Film Festival. It is currently seeking U.S. distribution.
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