Lucile Hadžihalilović doesn’t make horror movies in a standard sense, although her neo-noir body-horror film Earwig could come closest. However whereas The Ice Tower is not physique horror, it nonetheless could also be one in every of 2025’s creepiest movies. Followers of David Lynch and Alfred Hitchcock ought to go gaga — and never simply due to its eerie fowl assault. (Although that component doesn’t damage.) Hadžihalilović’s delicate contact makes The Ice Tower play like a fairy story: A 15-year-old lady named Jeanne, performed by newcomer Clara Pacini, runs away from her orphanage and slips into a movie set the place a re-imagining of Hans Christian Andersen’s The Snow Queen is being shot. There, she meets Cristina (Inception’s Marion Cotillard), who portrays the ice queen on the coronary heart of Andersen’s story. Off-screen, the film star radiates cruelty and attract in equal measure — Jeanne can’t look away from Cristina. What unfolds because the orphan descends into the unreality of moviemaking is a hypnotic coming-of-age story. Many filmmakers who attempt to obtain a Lynchian dream tone are inclined to overstylize or flip their motion pictures into thriller bins. Hadžihalilović had an easier method: experience “the road between actuality and fantasy” by going again to Andersen’s supply materials, actually and figuratively. Early within the movie, Jeanne reads his story to a youthful orphan, creating an otherworldly ambiance. When Jeanne winds up in a Snow Queen film, Hadžihalilović says it gave her “a method to escape, to construct a world, a universe, that has its personal actuality and guidelines.”
That universe, in The Ice Tower, is intentionally unreal. “We have been way more excited by filming the artificiality […] the faux snow relatively than the true snow, and the faux mountains painted within the background,” Hadžihalilović explains. The movie’s artifice turns into uncanny; there are occasions the place you may mistake The Ice Tower for the gritty live-action remake of Frozen. (And but, no, she hasn’t seen the Disney film.) Jeanne’s primal journey — a lady fleeing house, and stepping by means of a portal into one other world — provides to the film’s aura of fantastical horror. The Ice Tower would pair properly with Pan’s Labyrinth, with Cotillard filling in for Guillermo del Toro’s literal monsters. Hadžihalilović wished Jeanne to see “the Snow Queen for actual,” then “little by little grow to be an increasing number of concerned on this taking pictures till the second she’s contained in the story itself.” That offers the film a way of dream logic, a rhythmic sensation that Hadžihalilović says required a large amount of care when it got here not simply to the movie’s lush visuals, however to the soundtrack as properly. “We tried to make it very expressive and emotional, with not too many parts — we simply eliminated many issues, not solely within the picture, however rather a lot within the sound,” she says.
Picture: Yellow Veil Photos
Cotillard, who first labored with Hadžihalilović 20 years in the past on Innocence, channels that very same pared-down fashion. “I believe she intuitively remembered how I’d just like the actors to play this sort of deliberate or very restrained efficiency,” Hadžihalilović says. Pacini, against this, brings a wide-eyed vulnerability to Jeanne’s push-pull relationship with Cristina. The magnetism culminates in what Hadžihalilović calls “the massive kiss,” a grotesque, operatic second she frightened would possibly fall flat. “I believed Perhaps it’s not going to work,” she admits. However seeing it on set made her really feel the second was magical: “Wow, there’s something in it.” The Ice Tower just isn’t a direct adaptation of The Snow Queen, however Hadžihalilović wound up channeling Andersen’s fairy-tale work, which she calls “very darkish and really violent and really merciless.” She additionally fractures it with actuality, blurring grounding moments of harsh actuality all through the script. By the tip, a lot is left unsaid. The director teases that Jeanne could even be “inventing the movie throughout the movie,” a delicate suggestion that every little thing on display could be a hallucination. Hadžihalilović lives for the issues. Her characters are messier than Andersen’s. There’s extra at stake. They’re strong, however psychologically advanced. And but by inverting conventional fantasy tales, Hadžihalilović hoped to get even nearer to what Andersen did in his day: abandoning the anchor of logic. “[The Ice Tower] just isn’t reasonable in any respect,” she says with a wry smile. However it’s seductive, uncommon, and completely chilling. The Ice Tower opens in choose theaters on Oct. 3.
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