pretty much André Green's Dead Mother Complex put onto celluloid. our heroine loses her beloved but detached mother to suicide and restages the scenario through her compulsive repetition with Marion Cotillard's literal ice queen. that's the plot, no interpretation needed.

that being said this should have been my shit - especially considering that I found quite a liking in Hadžihalilović's oeuvre so far. it didn't really get me though, cause despite a couple of moments of beautiful imagery the paper thin fairy tale is taking its time to the point you have to call it slow cinema.

meanwhile the visual prowess of Innocence is not reached; what is the director's go to trademark is kind of left in the beauty…

Gorgeous and glacial in equally frosty measure, Lucile Hadžihalilović’s “The Ice Tower” is all art-film-only vibes, a wintry 1970s fairy tale about a screen actress who casts a potentially dangerous spell. It’s anchored by an actress, Marion Cotillard, who has one of the great faces, and a classical sophistication with a glamorous, out-of-reach noirish beauty that pairs wonderfully with a creature cut out of Hans Christian Andersen: amorous, elusive, but wounded.

Shot gorgeously in France and Northern Italy by cinematographer Jonathan Ricquebourg — this is truly the most visually astonishing movie so far to premiere at the 2025 Berlinale — “The Ice Tower” will prove an uneasy catch for commercially minded audiences looking for anything more than a mood in…

I've struggled to connect with Hadžihalilović's films in the past, but I really got lost in this one. It arguably has more of a story than usual for her, even though the story is still quite simple: a girl who feels lost and unloved turns to Someone Important – a towering icon of femininity and power – for validation, but finds only violence instead.

The atmosphere Hadžihalilović creates here is completely spellbinding. Two of its key ingredients are silence and darkness, and there are many staggering low-light shots throughout the film, such as a stunning wide composition of two dark figures on a snowy clifftop in the dead of night. Digital cinematography appears to be stretched to its outer limits to…

“boundless, majestic, and shimmering like ice, was the Snow Queen’s realm.”

under the glacial surroundings and frosty atmosphere lies the Snow Queen — in her element, or in her realm, i should say. she’s beautiful, powerful, and divinely feminine. as Jeanne (Clara Pacini) runs away from her foster home, she seemingly finds herself within proximity of the Snow Queen herself — is she real? or is this a dream? whatever it was, she instantly became enticed by her… 

then, all of the sudden, the director yells ‘CUT!’ and here lies, the snow, the enchanted backdrop, and its hauntingly beautiful nature — fake, all of them. what she stumbled upon was a film production — everything she just saw was not…