Far from Frozen: Director Lucile Hadžihalilović Unveils Her Icy New Thriller-Fable <em>The Ice Tower</em>
Lucile Hadžihalilović isn't known for conventional scary films, although her neo-noir body-horror movie Earwig nearly fits the bill. But while The Ice Tower doesn't focus on physical terror, it may yet rank as among the year's most unsettling films. Fans of David Lynch should find it mesmerizing — and not only due to its unnerving avian assault. (Though that element certainly adds to the unease.)
An Enthralling Story: Merging Reality and Fantasy
The director's refined touch makes The Ice Tower feel like a fairy tale: A 15-year-old girl, played by newcomer Clara Pacini, runs away from her care home and finds herself on a movie production where a fresh adaptation of Hans Christian Andersen’s The Snow Queen is being shot. On set, she meets Cristina (brought to life by Marion Cotillard), who portrays the ice queen central to Andersen’s story. Off-screen, the actress radiates cruelty and allure in similar amounts — Jeanne can’t look away by Cristina. What unfolds as the orphan descends into the unreality of moviemaking is a mesmerizing maturation story.
Building the Fantasy: Between Reality and Illusion
Numerous directors who attempt to capture a surreal, dreamlike quality often overcomplicate or turn their movies into puzzling enigmas. Hadžihalilović opted for a more straightforward approach: ride “the line between reality and fantasy” by returning to Andersen’s original story, both literal and figurative ways. At the beginning in the film, Jeanne reads his tale to a younger orphan, creating an ethereal atmosphere. When Jeanne finds herself in a Snow Queen movie, the filmmaker says it gave her “a way to escape, to build a world, a universe, that has its own reality and rules."
Our focus was on capturing the constructed elements […] preferring artificial snow over natural, and painted backdrop mountains.
This world, in The Ice Tower, is deliberately artificial. The film’s artifice becomes uncanny; at times where you could mistake The Ice Tower for a gritty live-action remake of Frozen. (Still, she hasn't, she hasn’t seen the Disney movie.)
A Primal Journey: From Home to Fantasy
The protagonist's fundamental path — young woman running from home, and entering a gateway into a different realm — enhances the movie’s aura of magical fear. The Ice Tower would complement with Pan’s Labyrinth, with Cotillard filling in for physical creatures. Hadžihalilović intended Jeanne to see “the Snow Queen for real,” then “little by little become more and more involved in this shooting until the moment she’s inside the story itself.”
That imparts the movie a feeling of dream logic, a flowing experience that required a great amount of care when it came not only to the film’s rich imagery, but to the soundtrack as well. “We tried to make it very expressive and emotional, with not too many elements — we just removed many things, not only in the image, but a lot in the sound,” she notes.
Restrained Performances: Cotillard and Pacini’s Dynamic
Cotillard, who first worked with the director two decades ago on Innocence, embodies that same pared-down style. “I think she intuitively remembered how I’d like the actors to play this kind of planned or very restrained performance,” she explains. Clara Pacini, on the other hand, brings a innocent openness to Jeanne’s push-pull relationship with Cristina. Their attraction culminates in what Hadžihalilović calls “the big kiss,” a bizarre, dramatic moment she feared might not resonate. “I thought Maybe it’s not going to work,” she confesses. But witnessing it during filming made her feel the moment was magical: “Wow, there is something in it.”
Dark Origins: Reimagining Andersen’s Fairy Tale
The Ice Tower is not a faithful retelling of The Snow Queen, but Hadžihalilović ended up drawing from Andersen’s fairy-tale work, which she calls “very dark and very violent and very cruel.” She also fractures it with realism, blurring anchoring scenes of harsh reality throughout the narrative. In the conclusion, plenty is left unsaid. The director hints that Jeanne may even be “inventing the film within the film,” a subtle implication that everything on screen might be a dream.
She thrives on the complexities. Her characters are more flawed than Andersen’s. There’s more at stake. They’re well-defined, but deeply layered. And yet by inverting traditional fantasy stories, the director hoped to get even nearer to what Andersen did in his day: abandoning the anchor of logic.
“[The Ice Tower] is not realistic at all,” she says with a wry smile. But it is alluring, unique, and absolutely chilling.
The Ice Tower debuts in limited cinemas on October 3.
