La tour de glace

A retelling of The Snow Queen, The Ice Tower, directed by Lucile Hadzihalilovic, treats the mirror as the film’s central mechanism. Jeanne (Clara Pacini), a teenage girl fleeing her foster home in a remote mountain village, crosses paths with Cristina (Marion Cotillard), an actress playing the Ice Queen on a nearby film set. Their meeting sets off a recursive dance of reflections: one older and one younger, one performer and one fugitive, yet each contains something of the other.

Their relationship becomes an infinity mirror – an endless loop of beauty and innocence, identity and performance, loneliness and desire. What is being mirrored is not simply appearance, but condition: roles that are prescribed, rehearsed, and performed. The film amplifies this multiplicity through its aesthetics. Corridors, doors, and lateral openings repeat in symmetrical compositions, creating visual echoes. Shots within shots, reflections within reflections – everything folds back on itself. The form mimics the content.

Fairy tales and fables have long served as markers of society. Their adaptive nature allows them to evolve with each retelling, shaped by the anxieties of their time. They hold up a mirror to the zeitgeist, shifting in tone and meaning across generations. In the present moment, these once simple moral lessons and “happy ending” bedtime stories have taken on darker shapes. Deeply of its time, The Ice Tower turns the mirror inward, asking what remains when identity fractures – and whether the real monsters were never in the woods, but in our own reflection.