You rarely get to see a fantasy film like The Ice Tower. In the Berlinale Competition 2025, Lucile Hadzihalilovic’s new work, which unfolds a dark winter fairy tale trance, is sure to inspire.
The fairy tale The Snow Queen is one of the longest and most complex works by the renowned Danish poet Hans Christian Andersen. He also penned classics such as The Princess and the Pea and The Little Mermaid. In the unusual fantasy drama The Ice Tower by director Lucile Hadzihalilovic, it is the favorite story of the young main character Jeanne – who suddenly seems to find herself immersed in the magical world of the fairy tale and encounters a very real Snow Queen.
The film, which is competing at this year’s Berlin International Film Festival, presents this encounter as a sleepwalking journey of discovery that eventually leaves you speechless. That is, if you don’t equate slow films with boring films.
This extraordinary fantasy trip feels like an endless tumble through the night
In The Ice Tower, the 16-year-old main character clings to Andersen’s fairy tale as if it were the most powerful story in the world. Perhaps the story gives her the comfort and hope she needs to escape the daily routine of the small orphanage where Jeanne lives in the 70s in the valley above a French city.
One snowy Christmas day, she escapes and tumbles down the icy slope into a new world, which Lucile Hadzihalilovic depicts with a slightly otherworldly realism. As Jeanne (Clara Pacini) wanders through this place at night, completely disoriented, it resembles a drowsy trance – and sets the pace for the rest of the story.
At a film festival like the Berlinale, works like The Ice Tower can be a curse or a blessing. If you are bombarded with a wide range of impressions in the cinema day after day, Hadzihalilovic’s film may be a test of patience, with your eyes closing several times. But the meditative, lulling pull of The Ice Tower can also trigger a pleasant relaxation that saves your Berlinale day.
The refuge where the protagonist of The Ice Tower finally gets lost also seems like a magical lifeline. Jeanne finds herself in a building that turns out to be a film studio where, of all things, an adaptation of the Andersen fairy tale is being shot.
The director takes about an hour to watch the main character sneak in and around the set. When Jeanne herself becomes part of the production as an extra, The Ice Tower slips away like the main character at the beginning. What follows is a dark, sensual dance between film set, imagination and fairytale world.
Marion Cotillard shines in The Ice Tower as an evil fantasy come to life
Marion Cotillard is developing into a fixture as actress Cristina Van Der Berg. She is not only cast as the Snow Queen, but also appears behind the camera as an apparition floating above it all. Cristina speaks of her role as a tyrant and monster, and the film remains unclear as to whether she adopted these character traits during the shoot or came to it with the best credentials.
Cotillard, who has established herself as one of France’s most gifted actresses in films such as La Vie en rose, plays Cristina as a fragile diva. At one moment she seems strangely vulnerable when German acting star August Diehl appears as doctor Max and injects her with a mysterious substance. At other times, Cristina sits in front of the test shots for the film like an icy grande dame who is never satisfied.
As a fantasy villain come to life, she is both a source of obsession and danger. For Cristina, Hadzihalilovic plays with the question of whether this Snow Queen, like the character from Andersen’s original, demands a sacrifice from all those who lose their hearts to her.
In the Danish author’s fairy tale, the little girl Gerda searches for her missing playmate Kay, who has been kidnapped by the Snow Queen. A dark adventure ensues, at the end of which the characters return home as adults.
For The Ice Tower, the director looks for cinematic points of reference when Jeanne, curious like Amélie, looks through holes in the wall, or when Winona Ryder, in Tim Burton’s Edward Scissorhands, wanders through the winter landscape and encounters boundaries behind which Alice in Wonderland seems to be hiding.
In the end, you look at The Ice Tower like a child looks at one of those snow globes, in which, after shaking, the white beads slowly trickle down onto a miniature landscape. Strangely fascinated and full of relaxed happiness.
