The Ice Tower

Femininity exerts a powerfully unsettling pull in the work of Lucile Hadžihalilović, a French auteur who’s never made a film of such coruscating, crystalline beauty as “The Ice Tower,” a hypnotic meditation on the enchantment that develops between an impressionable teenage runaway and the imperious film actress whose set she stumbles first onto, then into. Inspired in part by Hans Christian Andersen’s The Snow Queen, this glacially paced yet darkly dazzling fantasy opens as orphaned Jeanne flees her foster home and finds shelter in a film studio mid-production on an adaptation of Andersen’s fairy tale. On the set’s gleaming soundstage, Jeanne catches sight of the lead actress, Cristina, and is immediately spellbound by her frigid beauty and power. When Cristina takes an interest in her and casts her in a supporting role, Jeanne begins to idolize her as a figure of maternal, feminine, potentially even romantic obsession. The movie explores the dangerous mirroring between the two and the corrupting force of a false idol, weaving a hypnotic, trance-like melodrama charged with both beauty and menace.