A lonely, runway teen tries to find herself and makes an uncertain connection with an enigmatic actress in Lucile Hadzihalilovic’s fascinating The Ice Tower, now on Shudder.
Cowritten with Geoff Cox and directed solely by Innocence’s Lucile Hadzihalilovic, Ice Tower may be on Shudder, but let’s temper expectations: it’s not quite a horror film, at least not as directly as what normally becomes a Shudder exclusive. Instead, it’s a quietly unnerving meditative drama of obsession, loss, isolation, and tenuous connection.
In the 1970s, teenager Jeanne, played by astonding new comer Clara Pacini, leaves her snowy, mountainous French foster home for a new life and is drawn to a film studio, where enigmatic actress Cristina, worldwide superstar Marion Cotillard, is playing Hans Christian Anderson’s The Snow Queen (in a fun touch, Dino, the director of the film within the film is played by Gaspar Noe, the partner to his film’s director). Jeanne hides and sleeps in the studio at night, and works in the day, forging an odd friendship with Cristina. It’s a quiet film about the discomfort of finding oneself in a cold, distant world.
Hadzihalilovic and cinematographer Jonathan Ricquebourg fill the film with an unknowable ennui, a pervading sadness. Shots of wide emptiness imbue a stark loneliness and a gauzy, dreamlike quality. It’s this that drives itinerant teenager Jeanne to find a connection with the actress Marion Cotillard, both as a future for her, star quality, or of her deceased mother (with fabulous costuming connecting the two). The Ice Tower gives an intense loneliness. There’s an anxiety in waiting for a crash of what we know, as adults, a terrible situation for Jeanne in facing her truths and futures.
Cotillard is closed and withdrawn, and this makes her intriguing. It’s an acting choice that doesn’t make her desperately distant, but engaging. We, like Jeanne, try to read her and figure out what she really wants, and what Jeanne wants around it. She’s engaging, a mentor, and a thread; how much is Julie, how much is the personality she must give, what is the truth of a disconnected, unsure teenager, and what is a discontent adult; she radiates a power, drawing in.
Akin to the production she’s watching, The Ice Tower blends the lines of fantasy, fairy tale, film, and family. Fairy tales are often coming-of-age stories, and Julie experiences her own shifts across her time. What is true and what is illusion is engagingly fuzzy; whether it be in the film, in Julie, or in her connection. Thus, Ice Twoer is a quiet menace of a film, a deftly told poem of uncertain feelings, echoing the internal Jeanne. Pacini is fantastic in a debut performance, selling so many quiet, unsure glances of hidden pain.
The Ice Tower is a quietly powerful, disconcerting film. Marion Cottilard is wonderful, playing with an intensity against a highly capable new actor in Clara Pacini. It’s a fascinating, beautiful, highly felt film. For those who work in building vibes, I recommend Lucile Hadzihalilovic’s film. Now on Shudder.