Lucile Hadžihalilović rarely makes conventional horror, though her work flirts with the macabre; her neo-noir body-horror Earwig is a recent example. Her latest, The Ice Tower, nevertheless ranks among 2025’s most unnerving films. Admirers of David Lynch and Alfred Hitchcock will find plenty to savor — including a startling avian attack that lingers long after the lights come up.
Hadžihalilović approaches the material with a fairy-tale finesse. The story follows Jeanne, a fourteen-turned-fifteen orphan (played by newcomer Clara Pacini) who flees her institution and wanders onto a film set staging a new adaptation of Hans Christian Andersen’s The Snow Queen. There she encounters Cristina — portrayed by Marion Cotillard — the icy screen star whose off-camera charisma and coldness blur together, and from whom Jeanne becomes helplessly transfixed. What unfolds is a hypnotic coming-of-age fable that slowly unspools into a hallucinatory meditation on artifice and desire.
Where many filmmakers mimic Lynchian dream logic with flashy, overdetermined visuals, Hadžihalilović pursues restraint. She deliberately treads “the line between reality and fantasy,” rooting the film in Andersen’s original tale both literally and thematically: early scenes show Jeanne reading the fairy tale aloud to a younger child, seeding the film with an eerie, storybook atmosphere. When Jeanne drifts into the Snow Queen production, the director uses the set’s constructed unreality as a refuge — and a trap.
Image: Yellow Veil Pictures
