Lucile Hadžihalilović doesn’t make horror films in a traditional sense, though her neo-noir body-horror movie Earwig may come closest. But while The Ice Tower isn’t body horror, it still may be one of 2025’s creepiest films. Fans of David Lynch and Alfred Hitchcock should go gaga — and not just because of its eerie bird attack. (Though that element doesn’t hurt.)
Hadžihalilović’s delicate touch makes The Ice Tower play like a fairy tale: A 15-year-old girl named Jeanne, played by newcomer Clara Pacini, runs away from her orphanage and slips into a film set where a re-imagining of Hans Christian Andersen’s The Snow Queen is being shot. There, she meets Cristina (Inception’s Marion Cotillard), who portrays the ice queen at the heart of Andersen’s story. Off-screen, the movie star radiates cruelty and allure in equal measure — Jeanne can’t look away from Cristina. What unfolds as the orphan descends into the unreality of moviemaking is a hypnotic coming-of-age story.
Many filmmakers who try to achieve a Lynchian dream tone tend to overstylize or turn their movies into mystery boxes. Hadžihalilović had a simpler approach: ride “the line between reality and fantasy” by going back to Andersen’s source material, literally and figuratively. Early in the film, Jeanne reads his story to a younger orphan, creating an otherworldly atmosphere. When Jeanne winds up in a Snow Queen movie, Hadžihalilović says it gave her “a way to escape, to build a world, a universe, that has its own reality and rules.”
That universe, in The Ice Tower, is deliberately unreal. “We were much more excited by filming the artificiality […] the fake snow rather than the real snow, and the fake mountains painted in the background,” Hadžihalilović explains. The film’s artifice becomes uncanny; there are times where you could mistake The Ice Tower for the gritty live-action remake of Frozen. (And yet, no, she hasn’t seen the Disney movie.)
Jeanne’s primal journey — a girl fleeing home, and stepping through a portal into another world — adds to the movie’s aura of fantastical horror. The Ice Tower would pair well with Pan’s Labyrinth, with Cotillard filling in for Guillermo del Toro’s literal monsters. Hadžihalilović wanted Jeanne to see “the Snow Queen for real,” then “little by little become more and more involved in this shooting until the moment she’s inside the story itself.”
That gives the movie a sense of dream logic, a rhythmic sensation that Hadžihalilović says required a great amount of care when it came not just to the film’s lush visuals, but to the soundtrack as well. “We tried to make it very expressive and emotional, with not too many elements — we just removed many things, not only in the image, but a lot in the sound,” she says.
Cotillard, who first worked with Hadžihalilović two decades ago on Innocence, channels that same pared-down style. “I think she intuitively remembered how I’d like the actors to play this kind of planned or very restrained performance,” Hadžihalilović says. Pacini, by contrast, brings a wide-eyed vulnerability to Jeanne’s push-pull relationship with Cristina. The magnetism culminates in what Hadžihalilović calls “the big kiss,” a grotesque, operatic moment she worried might fall flat. “I thought Maybe it’s not going to work,” she admits. But seeing it on set made her feel the moment was magical: “Wow, there is something in it.”
The Ice Tower is not a direct adaptation of The Snow Queen, but Hadžihalilović wound up channeling Andersen’s fairy-tale work, which she calls “very dark and very violent and very cruel.” She also fractures it with reality, blurring grounding moments of harsh reality throughout the script. By the end, plenty is left unsaid. The director teases that Jeanne may even be “inventing the film within the film,” a subtle suggestion that everything on screen might be a hallucination.
Hadžihalilović lives for the complications. Her characters are messier than Andersen’s. There’s more at stake. They’re solid, but psychologically complex. And yet by inverting traditional fantasy stories, Hadžihalilović hoped to get even closer to what Andersen did in his day: abandoning the anchor of logic.
“[The Ice Tower] is not realistic at all,” she says with a wry smile. But it is seductive, unusual, and absolutely chilling.
The Ice Tower opens in select theaters on Oct. 3.
