More Than Just Ice: Director Lucile Hadžihalilović Discusses Her Frosty New Thriller-Fable <em>The Ice Tower</em>

Lucile Hadžihalilović isn't known for traditional horror films, even if her stylishly dark physical-fear movie Earwig nearly fits the bill. But while The Ice Tower doesn't focus on physical terror, it could still be among the year's most unsettling films. Devotees of David Lynch should find it mesmerizing — not just because of its unnerving avian assault. (Though this feature does contribute to the tension.)

A Hypnotic Tale: Merging Reality and Fantasy

Hadžihalilović’s delicate approach ensures The Ice Tower feel like a mythical story: A 15-year-old girl, portrayed by rising star Clara Pacini, runs away from her care home and finds herself on a film set where a fresh adaptation of Hans Christian Andersen’s The Snow Queen is being shot. There, she meets Cristina (brought to life by Marion Cotillard), who embodies the ice queen at the heart of Andersen’s story. Off-screen, the actress radiates charm and menace in equal measure — Jeanne is captivated by Cristina. The story that develops as the orphan descends into the dreamlike world of moviemaking is a hypnotic coming-of-age story.

Building the Fantasy: Between Reality and Illusion

Numerous directors who attempt to capture a Lynchian dream tone often overstylize or turn their movies into mystery boxes. The director chose a simpler approach: navigate “the line between reality and fantasy” by returning to Andersen’s original story, both actual and symbolic ways. At the beginning in the film, Jeanne reads his tale to a younger orphan, establishing an otherworldly atmosphere. When Jeanne winds up in a Snow Queen movie, the filmmaker explains it gave her “a way to escape, to build a world, a universe, that has its own reality and rules."

Our focus was on capturing the constructed elements […] preferring artificial snow over natural, and painted backdrop mountains.

This world, in The Ice Tower, is deliberately artificial. The film’s artifice becomes uncanny; there are moments where you could mistake The Ice Tower for a raw live-action version of Frozen. (Still, she hasn't, she is unfamiliar with the Disney movie.)

An Instinctual Quest: Escaping into Another World

The protagonist's fundamental journey — young woman running from home, and entering a gateway into another world — adds to the movie’s aura of fantastical horror. The Ice Tower would pair well with Pan’s Labyrinth, with Cotillard taking the place of physical creatures. Hadžihalilović wanted Jeanne to see “the Snow Queen for real,” then “little by little become more and more involved in this shooting until the moment she’s inside the story itself.”

This imparts the movie a sense of surreal reasoning, a flowing experience that required meticulous attention when it came not only to the film’s rich imagery, but to the soundtrack as well. “We tried to make it very expressive and emotional, with not too many elements — we just removed many things, not only in the image, but a lot in the sound,” she notes.

Subtle Acting: Cotillard and Pacini’s Dynamic

Marion Cotillard, who initially collaborated with the director two decades ago on Innocence, channels that same pared-down style. “I think she intuitively remembered how I’d like the actors to play this kind of planned or very restrained performance,” she says. Clara Pacini, on the other hand, brings a innocent vulnerability to Jeanne’s tumultuous relationship with Cristina. Their attraction peaks with what the director calls “the big kiss,” a grotesque, dramatic moment she worried might not resonate. “I thought Maybe it’s not going to work,” she admits. But witnessing it during filming made her feel the moment was magical: “Wow, there is something in it.”

Dark Origins: Reimagining Andersen’s Fairy Tale

The Ice Tower is not a faithful retelling of The Snow Queen, but Hadžihalilović wound up channeling Andersen’s storytelling, which she calls “very dark and very violent and very cruel.” She also fractures it with realism, blurring grounding moments of harsh reality throughout the narrative. By the end, much remains unspoken. The director hints that Jeanne may even be “inventing the film within the film,” a subtle suggestion that everything on screen might be a hallucination.

Hadžihalilović lives for the complications. Her protagonists are more flawed than Andersen’s. There’s more at stake. They’re well-defined, but deeply layered. And yet by reversing classic mythical narratives, the director hoped to get even nearer to what Andersen did in his day: letting go of the foundation of logic.

“[The Ice Tower] is not realistic at all,” she remarks with a knowing grin. But it is seductive, unique, and profoundly unsettling.

The Ice Tower opens in select theaters on October 3.