In Lucile Hadžihalilović’s hands, a mirror is a dangerous thing. Real mirrors, metaphysical mirrors, mirrors that go both ways. The Ice Tower, which is loosely inspired by Hans Christian Andersen’s The Snow Queen, is nothing if not a meditation on perception. It looks at how we perceive ourselves, how others perceive us, and how those directions are often interchangeable. So, too, may be the very тιтle of the film. Glace, in French, can mean either ice or mirror.

For Jeanne (Clara Pacini), a 15-year-old orphan girl, an attuned self-perception may come at a cost. Spending much of her days climbing into the snow-covered mountains that dot the backyard of the orphanage at which she stays, Jeanne dreams of leaving the isolation of her claustrophobic, overcrowded confinement. She bonds with one of the youngest girls, but otherwise wanders away or stares at an image of an ice rink in the nearby city.

A mountain hike ends with a brutal fall down a steep ice slope, and Jeanne hitchhikes to the ice rink, instead of back to the orphanage. At night, the rink looms, with string lights inviting her in. There, Jeanne watches Bianca (Valentina Vezzoso) pirouette with graceful ease. But the skater politely refuses to help Jeanne find a bed for the night, and so she resorts to breaking into the basement of a building before falling asleep in a shed. When she wakes, she is seemingly visited by The Snow Queen (Marion Cotillard), the elegant, mysterious figure from the book Jeanne loves to read.

The Ice Tower Takes The Shape Of A Fantasy & The Form Of A Dream In Surreal Adaptation

Hadžihalilović’s film often takes the shape of a fantasy film. Through the eyes of her youthful protagonist, the world is a startling place of mystery. Like in so many fantasies, Jeanne steps into something of a rabbit hole, ᴀssumes a new idenтιтy, and is introduced to a realm that seems far beyond the dimensions of her own. Frequently painted in images that are at once gorgeous and aching, The Ice Tower pulsates with the vibrant imagination of a teenager at the brink of adulthood.

But The Ice Tower is no children’s film. When Jeanne awakes, she realizes she is not being visited by any fairy queen but by an actress, Cristina (Cotillard), on a sound stage, in a film adaptation of Andersen’s tale. And, shortly after, after an auspiciously timed foray into town, Jeanne retrieves Bianca’s identification and decides to take on her glamorous name and persona when confronted by the crew. Suddenly, Jeanne is Bianca, an extra in a film with a diva at its center, being welcomed in by its mega-star as something between a protégé and a puppet.

Unlike Ingmar Bergman’s Persona, which feels like an obvious precursor as much as other metatheatrical films like Federico Fellini’s 8 1/2, the psychology of Jeanne/Bianca and Cristina is rather simple. Jeanne is an orphan because of her mother’s death by suicide; Cristina quickly becomes a surrogate. Cristina’s childhood was lost, too, and it is clear she views Jeanne as her own redo. But they are both treating each other with kid gloves. While Jeanne is fascinated and enamored with Cristina’s stardom, she overlooks her obvious cruelty. Cristina, meanwhile, willingly overlooks Jeanne’s lies — about her age, her name, her experience.

The Ice Tower is a slow, glacial affair, but not in an unpleasant way. Its creeping pace enables its dreamy atmosphere, brought about in breathtaking images. In ways that comment on the film apparatus itself, Hadžihalilović and cinematographer Jonathan Ricquebourg frame many frames within frames: Jeanne peering at Cristina through peepholes and cracks of doors and closets, watching playback of scenes they’ve just sH๏τ, the windowpanes encompᴀssing the lightly falling snow. But that pace comes at a cost. Olivier Messiaen’s score is haunting and provocative, but it, and Hadžihalilović’s direction, suggest a build towards a payoff that never really comes.

Nonetheless, even when the film has a hard time maintaining its interest, it can always count on those startling compositions. It is the type of film that asks for a deeper engagement than it is willing to offer, but Hadžihalilović may just be pulling us into her conception of image-making as a process of self-actualization. If that is the case, the film does well to break from Andersen’s tragic tale for something a bit more existential.

As Jeanne grows rapidly before our eyes, we are left to wonder if it is ever truly possible to maintain your personhood in a job that requires shedding of the skin to inhabit that of another. In The Ice Tower, that question is a matter of life and death.

The Ice Tower screened at the 2025 Beyond Fest.