The Ice Tower, a dark fairytale about the dangers of obse...

November 24, 2025Film & TVFeatureThe Ice Tower, a dark fairytale about the dangers of obsession

We speak to director Lucile Hadžihalilović about her fourth film, starring Marion Cotillard as a frosty screen star and newcomer Clara Pacini as the 14-year-old orphan who falls under her spell

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The day before she shoots one of her terrifying, otherworldly films, Lucile Hadžihalilović loves wandering around her sets. “When the crew’s not there and you’re alone at night, it’s like a children’s playground,” the 64-year-old French director tells me in Sea Containers Hotel, shortly after we scour the suite for the fanciest, clankiest glasses to drink from. “You can dream about what you’re going to do. You feel like you’re inside the film.”

While Hadžihalilović deploys the word “dream”, her films tend to skew closer to nightmares. In 2004’s Innocence, six-year-old girls arrive via coffin to a secluded forest where they’re imprisoned and taught ballet by Marion Cotillard. In 2015’s Evolution, young boys with amnesia are rewired to give birth through caesarean sections. More recently, 2021’s Earwig depicts a 10-year-old girl, Mia, who’s locked away because her teeth are made of ice.

Hadžihalilović’s fourth film, The Ice Tower, which she co-wrote with Geoff Cox, is so chilling and filled with glassy images that it may as well be set inside Mia’s teeth. When a 14-year-old orphan, Jeanne (Clara Pacini), runs away from her cramped home and steals a stranger’s wallet, she uses the new ID to sneak onto a film set and befriend the star. The production she stumbles upon is an adaptation of The Ice Queen starring a demanding diva, Cristina (Marion Cotillard), and helmed by a handsy director, Dino (Gaspar Noé in a wig).

It’s thus another story by Hadžihalilović about children in peril. “My films are always about the same type of girl, I suppose,” she says. “Well, Jeanne has teeth [unlike Mia]. But they’re orphans in a mysterious adult world.” While Jeanne is 14, Pacini, a first-time actor, was 22 during the shoot. (At other points during the interview, Hadžihalilović refers to Jeanne as 13, 14, 15, and 16, so it’s not an exact science.) “Clara is, and looks, much older than Jeanne. It works, because we understand why Jeanne wants to run away from her cocoon, this children’s world.”

After falling asleep on the set, Jeanne, who’s pretending to be an adult called Bianca, is mistaken for an extra. The power imbalance between her and Cristina starts from their opening interaction: sparkling in her Ice Queen costume, Cristina caresses the girl’s face when no one’s looking. On second viewing, Cristina’s sinister undertones are more apparent. Hadžihalilović notes: “The first time Cristina asks Jeanne to come to her room, she says, ‘Don’t be afraid. I’m not going to eat you.’ But then she tries to.”

As the relationship develops, it’s unclear whether their bond is familial, sexual or romantic. Jeanne is searching for a mother figure but is also in awe of Cristina, who is, let’s remember, played by Oscar-winner Marion Cotillard. Conversely, Cristina imagines Jeanne as the younger version of herself. When they kiss, it’s more like an interaction from a vampire horror.

“Cristina’s using her physical seduction,” says Hadžihalilović. “But it’s not only about having sex with a girl. It’s not so sexual for me. It’s more that she loves how she looks in this girl’s eyes. It’s like she’s looking at herself in a mirror. And then because Jeanne wants something that she can’t give – to be a mother – she freaks out.” Cristina’s eventual actions, she says, are impulsive, not calculated. “Me and Geoff wanted it to be a surprise – even to us. Jeanne says it herself: this world makes Cristina totally crazy.”

Until the 80s, you still had this attraction for images on the screen. You could believe in the magic and aura of an actress like Cristina. But now, it seems so banal

Utterly spellbinding, The Ice Tower is best-watched in the front row of a cinema, or, if it has to be on a device, then in total darkness with the screen pressed against your face. Shadows and piercing lights are diligently angled by mirrors and glass sculptures; snowy surfaces overwhelm the frame, except for occasional drops of blood, a lit cigarette, or a crow that adores biting people’s faces. With scale models, Hadžihalilović manipulates the size of her characters: Jeanne steps across miniatures; the girl’s eyeball at one point appears to be larger than Cristina’s sleeping body.

Hadžihalilović picked the 1970s setting for how the decade romanticised movie stars. Jeanne flicks through glossy magazine profiles of Cristina, learning her traumatic backstory for the first time. In an era before Instagram, it’s likely that Jeanne has little idea what a film set looks like, or the concept of watching dailies with a film crew. “Until the 80s, you still had this attraction for images on the screen,” says Hadžihalilović. “You could believe in the magic and aura of an actress like Cristina. But now, it seems so banal. Everybody knows everything today.”

She imagined the character of Dino to be the equivalent of Mario Bava or Jean Cocteau. “But they’re both dead. So I thought of casting Guillermo del Toro, because I know him a little bit, and I know he likes my films. You’d believe that Guillermo would make this kind of film.” She then worried that del Toro would be too busy to spend multiple days shooting what would amount to minimal screen time. “This is why I thought of Gaspar [Noé]: it wouldn’t be complicated to ask him.”

The Ice Tower

Noé is Hadžihalilović’s real-life partner and decades-long collaborator. Hadžihalilović edited his early work, co-wrote Enter the Void, and is a producer on several of his films; Noé was a cinematographer on Hadžihalilović’s breakthrough shorts. “If an actor played Dino, he’d be asking me about the character, and trying to get me to direct him,” she says. “I thought Gaspar would manage it by himself, even if he’s playing a totally anti-Gaspar type of director.” The other fictional crew members were played by friends and real filmmakers. “I thought it’d be funny.”

When Hadžihalilović was Jeanne’s age, she fell in love with Dario Argento’s giallo slashers at the cinema: “They stayed with me forever.” She’s yet to see Joachim Trier’s Sentimental Value but is aware of a gag where Stellan Skarsgård’s character inappropriately gives his grandchildren DVDs of The Piano Teacher and Noé’s Irréversible. “But with Dario Argento, those films aren’t as real. Haneke and Irréversible are more adult films.”

Hadžihalilović heard from a friend in France whose 15-year-old daughter found The Ice Tower to be overwhelming. “It was the dark, oppressive atmosphere,” says Hadžihalilović. “The soundtrack and feelings conveyed by the atmosphere are scary. It’s not a film for children, even if it’s a sort of fairytale.”

The director believes that the ideal audience for Innocence, a film that had a “15” certificate in the UK, is 10-year-old girls. For The Ice Tower, though, she says, “Girls around the age of Jeanne can relate to it, even if they’re not used to seeing this type of arthouse film. Maybe they don’t understand it, but you [open yourself] up to the emotions and feelings. It’s not a good idea to show it to children. But teenagers should watch it.”

The Ice Tower is out in UK cinemas on November 21, and will be streaming exclusively on BFI Player from 12 January 2026,

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