The Ice Tower Review: A Freudian Fairytale

The Ice Tower (La Tour de Glace) is a dreamlike, atmospheric story that presents several rich ideas but stretches its story far too thin.

Of course, Disney’s version of the story is slightly more distilled and family-friendly, but it explores many of the same themes; identity, compassion, and loneliness to name a few. Now, Lucile Hadžihalilović’s hypnotic drama The Ice Tower evolves Andersen’s story in a new direction, bringing its archaic characters into the modern world and placing them head-to-head with dark, unfamiliar dynamics of family and romance.

However, The Ice Tower is no conventional literary adaptation. The story follows a young girl named Jeanne (Clara Pacini), who runs away from a foster home in the mountains and seeks refuge in a movie studio where she joins the cast of a production of Andersen’s “The Snow Queen”. However, Jeanne’s own story quickly begins to mirror that of the film they’re making when she’s taken under the wing of the production’s lead actress Cristina (Marion Cotillard, of Lee), who develops an immediate fondness for the young runaway.

The most interesting thing about The Ice Tower is the way it uses Jeanne and Cristina’s complex relationship to mirror the story of “The Snow Queen”, blending reality and fiction as the characters struggle to separate their real lives from those of the characters they’re playing. It’s a fascinating angle to explore this story from, and it’s much richer than merely adapting “The Snow Queen” in a conventional way. Their dynamic is unquestionably the strongest part of this project, and Pacini & Cotillard have excellent chemistry that makes them endlessly captivating to watch.

However, the fundamental problem with The Ice Tower is that its narrative simply isn’t dense enough to sustain a two-hour runtime. So much of this film is wasted on lengthy conversations that don’t really say anything, gruelling exposition that isn’t relevant to the story’s core dynamic, and an overlong final act that just doesn’t know when to end. At its core, this is a brilliant short film that’s been watered down into a disappointingly average movie. 

And that’s a huge shame, because the filmmaking talent on display in The Ice Tower is immense. Hadžihalilović is clearly a very talented director, and the level of detail that she includes in every single shot is – mind the pun – towering. There’s such depth to the film’s cinematography that everything feels tactile and real, using the harsh environments and gloomy locations to mirror the emotions that the characters are feeling at certain points in the story. The sound design is also worth noting, as it paints an incredibly immersive portrait of this confusing world that Jeanne finds herself in.

The crux of this story is the dynamic between Pacini and Cotillard’s characters, but the latter doesn’t even appear until over half an hour into the film. This leaves the first act feeling somewhat directionless, and that immediately puts the audience at a distance that’s difficult to recover from. Thankfully, Cotillard’s performance is spectacularly moving and the film really picks up its pace once she arrives on-screen.

The Ice Tower may feel misguided and messy, but there are some genuinely poignant ideas at the heart of its story. The complex, Freudian dynamic between Jeanne and Cristina is subversive at every turn, playing with dysfunctional archetypes of romance and found family to create something both uncomfortable and impossible to look away from. The way Hadžihalilović allows these two narratives to exist on different levels but mirror each other thematically is expertly done; there’s just not enough substance or momentum to make the film exciting.

The Ice Tower (La Tour de Glace) premiered at the Berlin Film Festival on February 16, 2025. Read our Berlin Film Festival reviews and our list of 20 films to watch at the 2025 Berlin Film Festival!