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# The Ice Tower is a beautiful and melancholy fantasy
- URL: https://regionfree.net/the-ice-tower-2025-film-review/
- Published: 2026-08-21T14:28:13.000Z
- Updated: 2026-08-21T14:28:13.000Z
- Description: Haunting, melancholy, and beautiful, The Ice Tower is a mesmerizing work of fantasy that lingers long after the film ends.
- Author: Joonatan Itkonen
- Tags: In Theaters, Film & TV, #filmreview, #director-Lucile-Hadzihalilovic, #score-4

**The Verdict** 

"Haunting, melancholy, and beautiful, The Ice Tower is a mesmerizing work of fantasy that lingers long after the film ends." 

Region Free Score 

★★★★★ 

4/5 

The Ice Tower isn't strictly a fantasy film. It isn't entirely a coming-of-age story, either. Nor is it romance, drama, horror, or anything as easily classified. It's all and none of them at the same time, just like life tends to be, and that makes it special. As a companion piece to other films like it, you could just as easily pair it with Pan's Labyrinth or Teenage Sex and Death at Camp Miasma, and it would feel at home with both.

It's based on the Hans Christian Andersen story of the Snow Queen, which has been adapted so many times over the years that it's both overtly familiar and wholly unknown to most. We can recognize the main beats, but the emotional core is diluted by variation.

Written and directed by Lucile Hadžihalilović, The Ice Tower doesn't seek to replicate anything accomplished by prior adaptations. Instead, it follows Régis Loisel and his dramatic retelling of Peter Pan, and establishes the Snow Queen as a tale of sexual awakening on the cusp of adulthood. 

Our hero, Jeanne (Clara Pacini), looks like Little Red Riding Hood as she descends from the safety of her mountain home into the dark and complex world of 1970s France. There, she seeks refuge in a rundown film studio, where a small crew works on a new version of the Snow Queen, starring an aging diva, Cristina (Marion Cotillard), in the leading role. 

Jeanne adopts a new name, Bianca, and sheds her old life as Cristina tempts her with promises of intimacy and belonging. Her world is glamorous to the inexperienced and naive child, but we see the power dynamic for what it is. Yet Cristina isn't evil incarnate. Like Jeanne, she was abandoned at a young age, and there's a sense that her Big Bad Wolf (August Diehl) is both enabler and only friend. 

Much of the film is the furtive, clumsy dance between the two women, and Hadžihalilović gently guides us through Jeanne's conflicted emotions and starry-eyed fascination with impeccable skill. Cotillard, an iconic presence who can emote great pain with a raised brow, is tremendously moving as the isolated star yearning for a release from this world. 

In one haunting sequence, Cristina takes Jeanne to the mountains, where they admire the cold, uncaring landscape. Cristina suggests they can leave together, right now, and disappear. Jeanne is enamored by the idea, until she realizes Cristina's gaze is fixed upon the sudden fall into the void. They are two people surrounded by others who claim to care for them, but find solace only in their shared self-destructiveness. Their seductive dance has to take place on the precipice; otherwise it wouldn't interest either one.

This is a melancholy, hypnotic film, extremely deliberate in its pacing and structure. It moves like an avalanche, unexpectedly and with inescapable devastation. The moment Jeanne escapes the orphanage, we know she's never coming back. Hadžihalilović brilliantly uses fairytale iconography to communicate the fears of growing up, and we recognize the dangers we're taught from a young age in the almost animalistic portrayals of people Jeanne meets along the way. 

Watch, for example, how quickly we realize Jeanne is in danger when she hitchhikes a ride into town. There is no ominous music or overt camera work. We just know, and the dread fills the auditorium in seconds. 

And like the best fairytales, it leaves us with a lingering sense that even in finality, there is a chance of renewal for those who seek it. The film ends, but it doesn't leave us, and what a gift that is.