Critic Reviews

It is a mesmeric melodrama, mixing sensuality with a teetering anxiety, balancing on a cliff-edge of disaster.

This is not so much a film you watch as one you wake up from, shivering.

The Ice Tower is as fragile and delicate as a snowflake, as disorientating and mysterious as adolescence, and as dark as a winter’s night. For it is a shadowy frío-noir, complete with femme fatale, even as its elusive, edgy narrative is passed down, like keepsake beads or diffracting crystals, from generation to generation.

The director’s formal control, from the eerie electronic sounds of an ondes Martenot to the startling image of blood flowering across ice, collides the cinematic and the liminal.

Hadžihalilović has formed an homage to cinema as an enchantment-casting machine.

Hadzihalilovic is a director who refuses to compromise her very distinctive vision and that is the case here, even if The Ice Tower, which bows in Berlin Competition, is her biggest film to date; utterly beautiful in every frame with a breakout lead performance by young French actress Clara Pacini.

The understated performances and coolly detached, shivery hypnotic vibes of this film won’t be for anyone looking for a story, but The Ice Tower casts a creepy spell that lingers and even deepens in the mind long after it’s over. As only the best spells do.

The Ice Tower is ultimately too glacial and secretive to fully satisfy. The real magic here lies in Jonathan Ricquebourg’s dazzlingly chilly images, and two leads as compelling as the fantasy that set them in motion.

If you've already tested yourself with other beautiful, albeit lengthy, works of art, don't miss the opportunity of witnessing Hadzihalilovic's imperfect masterpiece. Allow yourself to be mesmerized by its beauty and consumed by the paranoia that surrounds it, much like Jeanne in the realm of the Snow Queen.

The Ice Tower is a beautifully crafted coming-of-age story that casts a hypnotic spell, expertly blending cinema and fairytale to captivating effect.