ICE TOWER, THE
(director/writer: Lucile Hadzihaiilovic; screenwriter: Geoff Cox; cinematographer: Jonathan Ricquebourg; editor: Nassim Gordji Tehrani; cast: Marion Cotillard (Cristina/Snow Queen), Gaspar Noe (Dino), August Diehl (Max), Clara Pacini (Jeanne), Marine Gesbert, Lilas- Rose Gilberti (Rose); Runtime: 118; MPAA Rating: NR; producer: Muriel Merlin; 38 Prods; 2025-France/Germany-in French, Derman, with English subtitles)
“The performances are magnificent.”
Reviewed by Dennis Schwartz
The talented French filmmaker Lucile Hadzihaiilovic (“Earwig”/”Evolution”) directs this fantasy drama and co-writes it with Geoff Cox. It takes on the motifs in a dreamlike way of Hans Christian Andersen’s fairy tale “The Snow Queen,” about a reclusive, threatening queen who lives alone in the snowy mountains in an enormous ice castle and who strikes fear in her subjects living in her shadows).
The film takes place in rural France, in the 1970s. Its slow pace makes it difficult to stay tuned into it without surrendering to its sadness, dullness and chilly observations. Psychologically it’s a Freudian example of ids and egos.
To get a better feel for life, the orphan 16-year-old Jeanne (Clara Pacini) runs away in the winter from her foster home located in a mountain village, in a remote part of France. She’s enthralled by teens at an ice skating rink and takes the name Bianca of one of the skaters who she admires. She then enters a movie studio in the city shooting Anderson’s “The Snow Queen. The fairy-tale mirrors her story and attracts her to the movie’s beguiling star Cristina (Marion Cotillard), struggling to be herself while playing the role of the bitchy queen. Cristina takes the runaway she completely identifies with under her wings, and both lives are a little better off than before. Their close relationship mirrors the involving fairy-tale story being shot.
However good this plotting device is (and it’s really good!), there’s not enough material to stretch it into a two-hour feature film even if it’s an enticing film about dealing with loneliness and searching for identity, the performances are magnificent, the striking visuals are blindingly glacial, the direction is top-shelf, and it’s aesthetically pleasing.
August Diehl plays Cotillard’s feel-good, heroin proscribing doctor on the set, while Hadzihaiilovic’s real-life husband, the celebrated director of the absurd, Gaspar Noe, plays the director of the Snow Queen film-within-a-film.
It has stuff that’s a turn off, but it’s also a perceptive visionary film that at times has sequences that could be magical.
It played at the Berlin Film Festival.
REVIEWED ON 2/25/2025 GRADE: B
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