The Ice Tower 4K 2025

The shards of ice, like a kaleidoscope, reflect the mountains and valleys bathed in the shimmering hues of the northern lights. These are the halls of the Snow Queen’s palace, a voiceover states. The Queen’s palace is vast, cold, and beautiful, just like she is. Amid this distorted landscape, a dark snow-capped peak stands out—it is the Ice Tower. Or is it the Queen?

Jeanne, a teenage girl from an orphanage, runs into the mountains again and again, and one day her wanderings lead her to the nearest major city, where, in search of a place to stay, she stumbles into a film studio. By a magical coincidence, they are filming an adaptation of her favorite fairy tale there—a slightly strange and gloomy one. And the lead role is played by Marion Cotillard, or rather, Christina. But everyone respectfully calls her “the Queen.” Jeanne sees her for the first time in the image of the Queen—straightforward, emotionless, glowing with a pale light.

Lucille Adzihalilovich’s film, with its phantasmagoria and unhurried pace, evokes the surrealist films of European experimental filmmakers of the 1970s (Rivette, Ruiz, Duras). Its “reality” consists of the dark labyrinths of streets in an unfamiliar city, a film studio, and the staircases and rooms of the dilapidated mansion where Christina is staying. Its “fantasy” consists of the film’s sets and the heroine’s dream. It is a gloomy and cold place, but, paradoxically, it seems beautiful to Jeanne: there she can roam freely among the slopes and frozen waters; there is no time and no pain.

The film seeks to hypnotize the viewer, to make them believe in its fairy tale, only to shatter this idealized fantasy in the finale and return them to a cruel reality—though perhaps not quite as cold. Essentially, this is a coming-of-age story in which the protagonist “dispels the spell” from her world. While Christina prefers to remain in her “ice tower,” avoiding intimacy, manipulating those around her, and numbing herself with injections, Jeanne is capable of escaping this theater of masks. In the final shots, executed, as in the beginning, using the whimsical technique of kaleidoscopic editing, the girl walks out to a murmuring waterfall, the source of a flowing, unfrozen river.

But this is also a metaphor for cinema and the filmmaking process. Adzikhaliovich seems to be warning against the illusory and fleeting nature of everything that happens on a film set. Her beautiful, fairy-tale-like film suggests: our subjective perception of anything is just another cinematic set.