The Snow Queen Haunts the Cutting Room

Read Time:4 Minute, 55 Second

MOVIE REVIEW
The Ice Tower (La tour de glace)
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Genre: Drama, Fantasy, Psychological
Year Released: 2025
Runtime: 1h 57m
Director(s): Lucile Hadžihalilović
Writer(s): Geoff Cox, Lucile Hadžihalilović, Alanté Kavaïté
Cast: Marion Cotillard, Clara Pacini, August Diehl, Gaspar Noé, Marine Gesbert, Lilas-Rose Gilberti
Where to Watch: in select theaters October 3, 2025

RAVING REVIEW: THE ICE TOWER doesn’t open with chaos. Instead, it settles into a quiet, unsettling rhythm that seeps under the skin. Set in the 1970s, the story follows Jeanne, a runaway orphan who stumbles into a film studio. There, she discovers a production of Hans Christian Andersen’s ‘The Snow Queen’ in progress and falls under the spell of Cristina, the star playing the role. What begins as fascination quickly deepens into something more dangerous, with Jeanne caught in a web of glamour, authority, and quiet menace.

Lucile Hadžihalilović directs with a sense of restraint and precision. Every frame is carefully composed, allowing shadows and silences to do as much work as the dialogue. The studio, city streets, and mountain landscapes blend until it’s no longer clear where the film set ends and Jeanne’s reality begins. That collapse of boundaries is the movie’s strongest weapon: cinema as enchantment, an image as both escape and trap.

Marion Cotillard delivers a deliberately ambiguous performance. Cristina may be regal and untouchable one moment, then wounded and fragile the next. Her portrayal blurs the line between actress and character, leaving Jeanne—and the audience—uncertain how much of what they see is performance and how much is truth. Clara Pacini, as Jeanne, brings an intensity that grounds the film. Her wide-eyed presence is never naïve; it’s the searching gaze of someone desperate for belonging, recognition, and safety, even if it comes at a cost.

The fairy tale framework isn’t just a backdrop—it’s baked into the storytelling. The Snow Queen’s cold beauty and deceptive power mirror Cristina’s allure, while Jeanne’s journey feels like a darkened inversion of a coming-of-age tale. The movie doesn’t use the source material as a plot, but rather as atmosphere, an echo that makes every glance and gesture feel mythic.

Sound plays an equally important role. Hadžihalilović avoids saturating the film with music, instead using silence, footsteps, and ambient noises to build unease. When music does appear, it cuts sharply, like ice cracking under pressure. The effect is hypnotic, drawing the viewer into the same spell Jeanne falls under.

Visually, the film thrives on its deception. Painted backdrops, glaring lights, and strikingly designed costumes underline the sense that Jeanne has entered a world that is both beautiful and hostile. The colors are purposeful—Cristina’s royal purples and Jeanne’s vulnerable reds—each carrying symbolic weight. It’s a movie where production design isn’t just decoration but an extension of character and theme.

For some viewers, the film’s deliberate pace may be perceived as a struggle. Hadžihalilović favors accumulation over explanation, asking the audience to surrender to the mood rather than seek all of the answers. That approach can test patience, especially in the midsection where the trance begins to stretch thin. However, the atmosphere never lets go, and even when scenes linger too long, the sense of unease persists. There’s a beauty to the film, not just visually, but also in its performances; they’re simple, straightforward, and yet also have a great depth to them.

At its core, THE ICE TOWER is about obsession and the fragility of identity when confronted with power. Jeanne’s devotion to Cristina isn’t foolish; it’s human, born from a hunger for connection. Cristina’s danger doesn’t lie in malice but in the blurred line between the control she exerts on set and the intimacy she cannot sustain off it. The dynamic between them is both magnetic and unsettling, a slow dance toward collapse.

By the final moments, the title resonates not as a literal structure but as a metaphor: a tower built of beauty and coldness, seductive but isolating, dangerous to climb and impossible to ignore. It’s a film that leaves you both entranced and unsettled, its chill lingering well after the screen goes dark. An arresting, rigorously made film that’s as beautiful as it is forbidding. If you can accept the story for what it is, you will get pulled into a world that feels familiar, yet also all of its own, with every frame having a story to tell.

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[photo courtesy of YELLOW VEIL PICTURES]

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