The Ice Tower (2025, Lucile Hadžihalilović)
Added 2025-11-18 23:50:27 +0000 UTC53/100
Not the warped fairytale I'd assumed (based on every promotional still), for better and worse. Better in that Hadžihalilović's strengths are largely suggestive, intimating another, stranger world at the threshold of our own; when she went full-bore surreal with Earwig, the eerie magic dissipated. Ice Tower plays footsie with the phantasmagoric but is arguably her most conventional feature to date, its emblematic moment being Jeanne's initial awed view of the Snow Queen, seemingly walking towards her...until a offscreen voice shouts "Cut!", the lights come up, and Jeanne discovers that the building she'd broken into is a low-rent movie studio. Her subsequent obsession with movie star Cristina Van Den Berg (Marion Cotillard in diva mode, a million miles away from her role in Innocence two freakin' decades ago) fuels a lot of potent silent observation, with Jeanne wandering the white-on-white sets and backdrops, mentally conflating reality and imagination. But you may recall that I mentioned a for-worse aspect, which kicks in when straightforward real-world trauma gets unexpectedly introduced. Jeanne turns out to have a Highly Urgently Relevant Tragic Backstory Yikes (HURTBY), deflating any mystery that had previously been generated. And just when it seemed as if that were too bluntly defining the central relationship, there's a #MeToo swerve from out of nowhere. (Well, I guess the dude whose truck she flees at the beginning counts as foreshadowing.) Satisfying endings have never been Hadžihalilović's forte, but usually it's "...oh. I kinda thought there'd be something more before the credits rolled" rather than "Yo, WTF?!" Still liked this much more than I did Earwig, thanks to lovely sequences like Jeanne watching Bianca skate at the ice rink and then awkwardly attempting to befriend her (is there a queer subtext that escaped me? that happens sometimes), but I can't deem it a return to form.
