FNC 2025 : ‘The Ice Tower’ : Marion Cotillard Freezes the Screen in a Dream of Cinema

There are 2 presentations of this movie at Festival du Nouveau Cinéma 2025: Cinéma du Musée Tuesday, October 14, 2025 - 5:45 PM — 7:55 PM Language: French Subtitle: English & Cineplex Quartier Latin - Salle 12 Saturday, October 18, 2025 - 8:45 PM — 10:55 PM Language: French Subtitle: English 

The Ice Tower (La Tour de glace) TRAILER / BANDE ANNONCE

 

FRANÇAIS app de traduction en haut

In Lucile Hadžihalilović’s The Ice Tower, the screen doesn’t merely reflect; it refracts, it entombs. Time slips, narrative withers, and what remains is image—icy, immaculate, and impenetrable. At the film’s center is Marion Cotillard, transformed into a spectral icon of stardom, her performance as much an invocation of Old Hollywood as it is an exorcism of its illusions. Working again with Hadžihalilović after 2004’s Innocence, Cotillard isn’t just acting here—she’s being sculpted, studied, and deified. The result is one of the most visually audacious and emotionally estranging films of the year: part fairy tale, part cinematic séance, and entirely Hadžihalilović.

Loosely inspired by Hans Christian Andersen’s The Snow Queen, The Ice Tower offers no tidy arc, no moral fable, no narrative comfort. Instead, we are presented with a spell. A girl, a queen, a ruinous palace of images—these are the film’s raw elements, arranged not so much for plot as for atmosphere and allusion. The story, if one insists on the word, follows Clara (Alix Thomas), an orphaned girl who escapes her alpine foster home and wanders into the basement of an abandoned movie studio, where she is entranced by the cold light of cinema—and the even colder diva who rules over it.

That diva is Cristina Van Der Berg, played by Cotillard with a kind of calculated remove that borders on performance art. She appears to Clara first as a projection—a towering screen goddess mid-monologue—and later as a living myth, stalking the empty halls of the film set in full costume, her sequined gown catching stray light like a prism. Cotillard’s Cristina is neither fully real nor wholly imagined; she exists in that eerie liminal space Hadžihalilović excels at evoking, a twilight zone between dream and discipline, performance and imprisonment. She speaks in fragmented phrases, as though possessed by the detritus of long-lost scripts. Her voice is lush but hollow, a monument slowly eroding.

For Clara, Cristina becomes a figure of awe and seduction, a shimmering embodiment of both artistic aspiration and the danger that lurks behind it. In one sequence—a signature Hadžihalilović blend of surrealism and surgical precision—Clara stumbles upon a projection booth where reels of 35mm film spill like entrails. The moment is tactile and haunting: cinema as sacred relic and arcane machinery, both intoxicating and indifferent. Clara burns her fingers on the celluloid. The image stings because it’s too beautiful.

And that’s the paradox that defines The Ice Tower: beauty becomes a barrier. The film is exquisitely designed, with Jonathan Ricquebourg’s cinematography casting the world in frosty silvers, pale blues, and the occasional, jarring flare of gold or crimson. The sets evoke a decaying opera house: velvet-draped chambers, spiral staircases that vanish into darkness, rooms that seem to breathe dust. Every frame looks like it could hang in a museum. But to live inside that beauty, to seek warmth or story or intimacy, is to risk disappointment. This is not a world built for comfort. It’s a mausoleum for reverie.

Hadžihalilović’s fascination with the rituals of childhood and the dangers of adult projection—so central to her earlier works like Innocence and Evolution—here becomes a meta-commentary on cinema itself. The Ice Tower is not just the set, or the studio, or the imaginary palace of the Ice Queen. It is the medium: cinema as cathedral, cinema as fortress. Jeanne (Clara’s name in some cuts), like the viewer, becomes both worshipper and prisoner.

In this sense, Cotillard doesn’t play a character so much as an embodiment of the screen’s paradox: eternally present yet unreachable, emotive yet unreadable. It’s a performance that invites analysis more than empathy. Some will find it thrillingly mannered; others, infuriatingly vacant. Either way, it’s a provocation—an invitation to gaze, and question the act of gazing.

Notably, The Ice Tower resists much of what contemporary audiences have come to expect from even the most artful cinema. There is no catharsis, no clear resolution. Dialogue is minimal, almost vestigial. Plot points arrive obliquely or not at all. Instead, Hadžihalilović orchestrates a sensory experience of gradually accumulating unease. Her aesthetic rigor recalls early Peter Greenaway or the asceticism of Chantal Akerman, while her themes echo David Lynch’s Mulholland Drive: the mask of performance, the fragility of identity, the violence of fantasy.

And yet, there are moments when the spell frays. The film’s pacing, as deliberate as melting ice, risks alienating even the most patient viewer. The child’s inner life—so essential to grounding such abstractions—remains elusive. We never quite understand what Clara wants, or what she fears. That may be intentional, part of Hadžihalilović’s refusal to sentimentalize. But it also limits the film’s emotional reach. Like its titular tower, the film can feel inaccessible, a marvel to behold but impossible to enter.

One wonders, too, whether Cotillard’s considerable emotional range is underutilized. So often cast for her ability to suggest deep feeling with minimal effort, here she is frozen in place, all gesture and pose. It’s a fascinating experiment in image-as-character, but it also flirts with self-parody. A less generous reading might argue that Cotillard, so luminous when granted warmth, is miscast as an ice queen. A more generous one might say she transcends the casting—transforming coldness into commentary.

Still, The Ice Tower lingers. Its final image—Cristina ascending a spiral staircase into darkness, her dress trailing frost behind her—is devastating in its stillness. It’s an ending that offers no resolution, only a fading echo. Cinema, the film seems to say, is not a mirror but a mirage. We reach for it, only to find our hands empty. Or burned.

There is, of course, a certain irony in writing about this film in traditional critical terms. Hadžihalilović has little interest in plot mechanics or character arcs. She makes films like installations, like rituals. To "review" The Ice Tower is to risk missing the point. It is not to be understood, but endured. Not interpreted, but inhabited—if you can withstand the chill.

What Hadžihalilović has crafted is not a fairy tale in the Disney mold, nor even a revisionist one. It is closer to a cinematic dirge: a hymn to the lost innocence of watching, the seductive cruelty of beauty, and the inescapable estrangement that occurs when art becomes obsession. It may bore some, bewilder others. But for those attuned to its frequency, it will mesmerize.

The Ice Tower is less a film than a frozen prayer. Whether that prayer is for cinema’s salvation or its funeral remains as open—and as cold—as the screen that fades to white. A masterclass in style, mood, and cinematic self-reflection. But don’t expect warmth—or answers.

LENA GHIO   

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