The Ice Tower (15)

Lucile Hadžihalilović’s otherworldly coming-of-age story drifts between fairytale and filmmaking with a dreamy, unsettling pull.

Set in a 1970s mountain village, the film follows 15-year-old Jeanne (Clara Pacini), who flees her orphanage and stumbles onto the set of The Snow Queen. Already obsessed with the tale, she slips into a new identity and becomes drawn to its star, Cristina Van Der Berg (Marion Cotillard), whose cool, magnetic presence blurs the line between fantasy and something more dangerous. As Jeanne works as an extra, her fixation deepens, and the film smartly keeps the nature of their bond hovering just out of reach.

Hadžihalilović weaves the story with a hazy tension, folding reality into the film-within-a-film through playful shifts that reveal how easily cinema can distort longing. Cotillard adds an enigmatic charge, offering flashes of fragility beneath the Snow Queen’s poise, while Pacini is a striking newcomer, grounding Jeanne’s curiosity and confusion with real emotional weight.

It’s less as a puzzle to be solved than an experience to drift through, Gorgeous cinematography, evocative ‘70s design, and a lush score heighten that spell. The result is a hypnotic, elegant tale about desire, identity, and the allure of stepping into someone else’s story.