The visionary director isn't known for conventional scary films, even if her neo-noir body-horror movie Earwig comes quite close. Yet while The Ice Tower doesn't focus on physical terror, it could still be among the year's most unsettling films. Fans of Alfred Hitchcock will likely be enthralled — not just because of its unnerving avian assault. (Though this feature certainly adds to the tension.)
An Enthralling Story: Merging Reality and Fantasy
Hadžihalilović’s subtle touch makes The Ice Tower feel like a mythical story: A 15-year-old girl, portrayed by rising star Clara Pacini, runs away from her care home and slips into a film set where a fresh adaptation of Hans Christian Andersen’s The Snow Queen is being shot. On set, she meets Cristina (played by Marion Cotillard), who portrays 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 can’t look away by Cristina. The story that develops as the young girl enters the unreality of moviemaking is a mesmerizing coming-of-age story.
Building the Fantasy: Between Reality and Illusion
Many filmmakers who try to achieve a surreal, dreamlike quality often overcomplicate or turn their movies into puzzling enigmas. The director opted for a more straightforward method: ride “the line between reality and fantasy” by revisiting Andersen’s source material, in actual and symbolic terms. Early in the film, Jeanne reads his tale to a small child, establishing an ethereal mood. When Jeanne winds up in a Snow Queen movie, Hadžihalilović 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 deliberately unreal. The film’s constructed nature turns eerie; at times where you could confuse The Ice Tower for a gritty live-action remake of Frozen. (And yet, no, she hasn’t seen the Disney movie.)
An Instinctual Quest: Escaping into Another World
The protagonist's fundamental path — a girl fleeing home, and entering a gateway into a different realm — enhances the movie’s feel of fantastical horror. The Ice Tower would pair well with Pan’s Labyrinth, with Cotillard filling in for literal monsters. 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 gives the movie a feeling of surreal reasoning, a rhythmic experience that demanded a great amount of care 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
Marion Cotillard, who initially collaborated with the director two decades ago on Innocence, channels that same pared-down style. “I think she intuitively remembered how I’d like the actors to play this kind of planned or very restrained performance,” she explains. Pacini, on the other hand, offers a wide-eyed vulnerability to Jeanne’s tumultuous relationship with Cristina. The magnetism culminates in what Hadžihalilović calls “the big kiss,” a grotesque, dramatic moment she worried might fall flat. “I thought Maybe it’s not going to work,” she confesses. But seeing it on set made her feel the moment was enchanting: “Wow, there is something in it.”
Grim Inspirations: Reinterpreting Andersen’s Fairy Tale
The Ice Tower is not a direct adaptation of The Snow Queen, but Hadžihalilović ended up drawing from Andersen’s storytelling, which she calls “very dark and very violent and very cruel.” She also fractures it with realism, obscuring anchoring scenes of harsh reality throughout the narrative. In the conclusion, much remains unspoken. The director teases that Jeanne may even be “inventing the film within the film,” a understated suggestion that everything on screen might be a dream.
She thrives on the complications. Her characters are more flawed than Andersen’s. There’s more at stake. They’re well-defined, but deeply layered. And yet by inverting classic mythical narratives, Hadžihalilović aimed to get even nearer to what Andersen did in his day: abandoning the foundation of logic.
“[The Ice Tower] is not realistic at all,” she says with a knowing grin. But it is seductive, unique, and absolutely chilling.
The Ice Tower opens in select theaters on Oct. 3.
