The Ice Tower

As beguiling as it is mystifying, Lucile Hadžihalilović’s surreal, folklore-inspired The Ice Tower (or, its French title, La tour de glace), is not a film for everyone – and I am not referring to the divide between critical and commercial opinion. Even within critical circles, this is a movie which some will dismiss entirely. However, The Ice Tower is a fantastic film. What will anger some is how the film gives us all of the images and none of the answers; but that, in this critic’s opinion, is all for the benefit of a truly hypnotic viewing experience.

We follow a young girl called Jeanne (played excellently by Clara Pacini) whom – after a series of unfortunate happenings – finds herself without money and shelter in the night. Upon finding refuge in an active film set, her love of the fantasy story ‘The Ice Queen’ finds tactile life in a production lead by the domineering actress Cristina (Marion Cotillard), who goes to great phycological lengths to embody the icy figure. There is, throughout, a transitory, dreamlike – and occasionally nightmarish – cinematic approach on display. One can never be certain where exactly we are in the development of this tale, and why, necessarily, we’re seeing what we’re seeing. Much of the story is presented to us in abstract, illusory terms.

I’d like to address maybe a slight bias on my part as a film-fan. La tour de glace effectively belongs to my favourite genre of filmmaking. And if you can’t call it a genre, then let us again use this word, “approach”. Movies in which the identities of women blend and contort; movies in which the gap between the dream world and the real world grows ever less significant; movies in which the film form is used to reflect this flowing state of disassociation and obsession. The go-to for this sub-genre(?) is probably Mulholland Drive (2001). And the fact that this film simultaneously evokes such a seismic picture, and crafts something wholly unique, is what makes this a gorgeously composed, addictively polarising near-masterpiece.

But one more element that adds to this critic’s obsession is the fact that this is a film about filmmaking – and an interesting one at that. Much like Jean-Luc Godard’s Le Mepris (1963), we have a recognisable, divisive real-life director in the fictional filmmaker role. In Godard’s, it was Fritz Lang; here, it’s Gaspar Noé. Conceivably, it’s a metatextual practice that has its roots held firmly in the French Cinema; since also, the manner in which Hadžihalilović depicts the chaos and romance of movie production evokes much of Truffaut’s La Nuit Américaine.

While decidedly imperfect – at this stage in cinema’s evolution, it’s such a wonderful and hopeful thing to see art films continue to push the boundaries of storytelling and shot construction. And that’s a spirit which feels present throughout this movie’s running length. If you enjoy films which merge the fantastical with the meditative, and the cinematically glacial (no pun intended) with the surreal – then this might very well be your jam. It was most certainly mine.

THE ICE TOWER opens in cinemas in the UK & Ireland on 21 November 2025