More Than Just Ice: Filmmaker Lucile Hadžihalilović Explores Her Frosty New Thriller-Fable <em>The Ice Tower</em>
The visionary director doesn’t typically create conventional scary films, although her stylishly dark physical-fear movie Earwig nearly fits the bill. However while The Ice Tower isn't body horror, it could still be one of 2025’s creepiest films. Enthusiasts of Alfred Hitchcock will likely be enthralled — not just because of its eerie bird attack. (Although this feature certainly adds to the tension.)
A Hypnotic Tale: Blending Reality and Fantasy
The director's delicate approach ensures The Ice Tower feel like a fairy tale: Teenager Jeanne, played by newcomer Clara Pacini, runs away from her care home and finds herself on a film set where a re-imagining of Hans Christian Andersen’s The Snow Queen is being shot. There, she encounters Cristina (brought to life by Marion Cotillard), who embodies the ice queen at the heart of Andersen’s story. Away from the camera, the movie star radiates cruelty and allure in similar amounts — Jeanne is captivated by Cristina. What unfolds as the orphan enters the unreality of filmmaking is a hypnotic maturation story.
Crafting the Dream: Between Reality and Illusion
Many filmmakers who attempt to capture a surreal, dreamlike quality often overstylize or turn their movies into puzzling enigmas. Hadžihalilović chose a more straightforward method: navigate “the line between reality and fantasy” by returning to Andersen’s source material, in actual and symbolic terms. At the beginning in the film, Jeanne reads his tale to a small child, establishing an otherworldly mood. When Jeanne finds herself in a Snow Queen movie, the filmmaker explains 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.
That universe, in The Ice Tower, is intentionally unreal. The film’s constructed nature turns eerie; at times where you could confuse The Ice Tower for a raw live-action version of Frozen. (And yet, she hasn't, she is unfamiliar with the Disney movie.)
A Primal Journey: From Home to Fantasy
The protagonist's primal path — a girl running from home, and stepping through a portal into a different realm — adds to the movie’s aura of fantastical horror. The Ice Tower would pair well with Pan’s Labyrinth, with Cotillard taking the place of physical creatures. Hadžihalilović wanted 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.”
This imparts the movie a feeling of surreal reasoning, a flowing experience that required meticulous attention 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.
Subtle Acting: Cotillard and Pacini’s Dynamic
Cotillard, who first worked with the director two decades ago on Innocence, channels that same minimalist style. “I think she intuitively remembered how I’d like the actors to play this kind of planned or very restrained performance,” she says. Pacini, on the other hand, offers a innocent openness to Jeanne’s push-pull relationship with Cristina. Their attraction culminates in what the director calls “the big kiss,” a grotesque, operatic moment she worried might fall flat. “I thought Maybe it’s not going to work,” she admits. 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 wound up drawing from Andersen’s storytelling, which she calls “very dark and very violent and very cruel.” She also breaks it apart with realism, obscuring grounding moments 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 understated implication that everything on screen might be a dream.
She thrives on the complexities. Her protagonists are messier than Andersen’s. The risks are higher. They’re solid, but psychologically complex. And yet by reversing traditional fantasy stories, the director aimed to get even nearer to what Andersen did in his day: letting go of the anchor of logic.
“[The Ice Tower] is not realistic at all,” she says with a wry smile. But it is seductive, unique, and absolutely chilling.
The Ice Tower opens in select theaters on Oct. 3.
