Critics Campus 2025 participant Sophie Terakes unpacks the entrancing depictions of devotion, emotional displacement and desire in Lucile Hadžihalilović’s The Ice Tower, in which a fairytale adaptation collides with the real-world entanglement between its imperious lead actor and the orphaned teen she takes under her wing.

Waking from her slumber, a teenage girl, Jeanne (Clara Pacini), raises one eye to a crack in the wall of her dim, cramped hideout. Through the hole, she sees a lone figure emerging from the darkness. Her willowy form is fitted in a gown encrusted with ivory sequins and her hair, a matching shade of white, is laced with falling snow. Bathed in a pool of shimmering light, the woman seems conjured from the girl’s still-dreaming mind.

Despite its enchanting façade, Lucile Hadžihalilović’s The Ice Tower treads strange and sinister ground. Just as the woman approaches, a voice on the periphery of the frame yells out “Cut!”, abruptly grounding the vision in the reality of a film set. The stage lights die, and the object of Jeanne’s gaze, Cristina (Marion Cotillard) – the film’s enigmatic and achingly glamorous star – looks down, staring back at her with an unflinching hunger. Charged with a palpable sense of violence, Cristina’s stare presages her almost animalistic desire for both Jeanne’s devotion and her body.

Jeanne, haunted by the death of her mother, has fled her mountainside foster home to seek shelter in a film studio in 1970s France. To her delight, she discovers that an adaptation of her favourite fairytale, Hans Christian Andersen’s ‘The Snow Queen’, is in production there. While grazing at the catering table, she inadvertently lands a role as an extra in the film and garners the attention of Cristina.

Yearning for an indefinable mixture of maternal and romantic affection, Jeanne grows increasingly obsessed with Cristina, spying on her in her dressing room, cutting her image out of magazines and stealing baubles from her costume. A fellow orphan with a wounded core, Cristina sees a version of herself in Jeanne and adopts her as a protégée, granting the girl a speaking role in the film and a plush hotel suite. However, unsatisfied with friendship, the vampiric star seeks a more vicious and mysterious form of love. With promises of protection and attention, Cristina deftly ensnares the runaway in her cold arms.

Throughout the film, Jeanne projects fantasies onto older girls and women that spiral into bouts of violence. Early on, she watches a dewy-skinned Italian teenager named Bianca skate at an ice rink. The camera lingers on the latter’s long, balletic legs, sheathed in glimmering white stockings. When Jeanne’s timid flirtations are rebuffed, she imagines Bianca brutally falling on the ice, the image crackling with the sound of her body skidding across the frost. In another scene, Cristina takes Jeanne into the surrounding icy wilderness, where she suggests, in breathy tones, that they “disappear” together. Jeanne mistakes the invitation for a suicide pact, and pulls the actress towards the precipice of the cliff. The camera lurches forward as the pair narrowly avoid plunging to their deaths. For Jeanne, obsession and annihilation are coiled in a worrisome embrace.

The Ice Tower

Hadžihalilović’s work has demonstrated a relentless fascination with entrances into adolescence marked by malevolence. Her 1996 mid-length work La bouche de Jean-Pierre (MIFF 2022) and her early collaborations with her partner, director Gaspar Noé (I Stand Alone, MIFF 1999), unfurled the lives of abused, isolated children; Evolution (MIFF 2016) depicted a community of boys groomed to bear babies, ripe with images of small, swollen bodies strapped to metal benches.

At once gossamer and grotesque, Hadžihalilović’s portraits of girlhood relish in illusions of adult desire destroyed by the reality of violence. The foundations of her latest venture are knotted throughout her debut feature, Innocence (MIFF 2005), which centres on a nubile society of girls living in a secluded boarding school. Desperate to experience the pleasures of the outside world, one girl resorts to fantasising about the erotic touch of a gentleman’s theatre glove that she happens upon. She eventually pierces the periphery of her sheltered Eden, only to be confronted by the objectifying gaze of men.

The Ice Tower extends on this exploration of hostile spectatorship, offering a thoroughly self-reflexive examination of cinema. Jeanne, both victim and obsessive voyeur, is frequently pictured watching The Snow Queen dailies in the studio’s projection room. As Cristina’s silver-frosted eyelids and bright porcelain skin illuminate the screen, she appears part of the very fabric of cinema; and as Jeanne’s illusions of Cristina bleed into Lynchian nightmares, the light of the screen dwindles, her celluloid image flickering and ripping at the edges.

Melding fantasy and fear, the constructed realm of The Snow Queen and the banal film set intermingle and overlap. Sleight-of-hand edits conflate Cristina’s role as the queen with her prima donna persona: in one scene, Jeanne (possibly) glimpses her reduced to miniature, asleep inside a dollhouse-sized castle; later, she envisions Cristina commanding a crow to attack another actress. In these moments, Hadžihalilović revels in ambiguity, teasing Jeanne with the possibility that Cristina possesses the same nefarious powers as the fabled queen. With the painted-on snow-capped peaks and eerily expansive studio looming over the slight crew, the set also proves a profoundly unsettling space.

In a meta-cinematic turn, the fantasy of The Ice Tower itself eventually collapses inwards. As time slows down to a crawl, the sparkling snow realm becomes suffocated by a perpetually dying dusk. The wondrous lights of the stage grow dizzying when coupled with the clanging tones of an ondes Martenot, an instrument that uncannily conjures the high-pitched voice of a child. Glamoured into a state of hypnosis, the audience feels like Cristina, numbed by the secret opiates her doctor Max (August Diehl) administers, or like Jeanne, drunk with desire. Bewitching with its heady atmosphere and clamorous soundscape, The Ice Tower leaves its viewers powerless to its spell.

The Ice Tower screens on Saturday 16 and Saturday 23 August as part of the MIFF 2025 program.

The above has been written as part of MIFF’s Critics Campus program. The opinion expressed is the author’s and does not necessarily reflect that of the festival.