The Ice Tower 4K 2025 Ultra HD 2160p

Story Movie

The 1970s. Jeanne, an orphan, runs away from the orphanage to the city. She finds refuge at a local film studio. There, she falls under the spell of Christina, the enigmatic star of *The Snow Queen*, a film based on her favorite fairy tale. A complicated relationship develops between the actress and the young woman.

Review 4K Movie

Lucille Adzialilovich’s "The Ice Tower" is a dark fairy tale filmed with a cold, almost surgical precision. The story is set in France in the 1970s.
Orphan Jeanne (Clara Pazzini) runs away from an orphanage and accidentally stumbles onto the set of the film “The Snow Queen”—an adaptation of Hans Christian Andersen’s fairy tale. There she meets actress Christine (Marion Cotillard), who exerts a destructive influence on her. In this surreal coming-of-age tale, cinema serves as a fairy-tale mirror—the reflection distorts, and the illusion becomes a trap.

The film opens with a striking shot: a vast, icy landscape and the tiny figure of a girl making her way through the snowy void.
Jeanne is a teenager with eyes like dark pools, the eldest in a foster family and the teller of bedtime stories. In search of freedom and a mother’s love, she runs away from the orphanage, taking with her beads taken from her deceased mother’s body.

The city greets her with indifference and menace. Tired and hungry, Jeanne makes her way into the basement of a half-abandoned building and discovers a shiny piece of fabric on the floor, spread out like bedding, as if laid out just for her. Before going to sleep, she picks up a shard of crystal—a magical gesture, like rubbing a lamp, materializing a desire she didn’t even know she had. The next morning, Jeanne wakes up backstage at the film set.

Taking the name of the girl whose bag she found on the street, Jeanne becomes Bianca and drifts even further from reality. She watches the rehearsals, hides in a closet, eavesdrops on the adults’ conversations, and gazes spellbound at Christina. It is not the film that draws her, but the actress—her power, her arrogance, and her aloofness. Christina notices the girl and unexpectedly responds to her silent devotion, which asks for nothing in return.

Adzialilovich’s Snow Queen is a false idol, an insensible beauty behind which lies a corrupting power. The underlying threat, felt in the movie star’s predatory gaze upon her young protégée, is frightening, but blinded, Bianca fails to recognize the danger.

This mesmerizing interpretation of “The Snow Queen” is a triumph of imagination. The predominant shades of brown and orange contrast effectively with the white and silver tones. Cinematographer Jonathan Rickburg (“The Recipe for Love”) lends each frame a softness—a “film haze” characteristic of 1970s films. The soundscape—the crunch of snow underfoot, the empty echoes of the film set, background music from the hotel lobby—intensifies the sense of unease.
The production designer brings winter landscapes indoors, transforming them into theatrical sets where the actors resemble puppets. The world of "The Ice Tower" is so distorted that it doesn’t seem like a real place, and it is precisely this liminal space between two worlds that becomes the film’s central setting.

Hitchcock’s influence is evident on set: a sudden bird attack, Christina’s sadistic detachment from others’ pain, and hints at director Dino’s (Gaspard Noé) next “Hitchcockian” project. The reference to “The Red Shoes”—another Andersen fairy tale—emphasizes the destructive nature of desire, but in spirit, the film is closer not to Powell and Pressburger’s ballet hysteria, but to their “Black Narcissus”: female madness, a closed environment, and the piercing cold of the mountains.

“The Ice Tower” simultaneously delights and tests one’s patience, and form often takes precedence over content. The material is dramaturgically too sparse for a two-hour runtime: dialogues rarely advance the plot, entire scenes unfold without words, the exposition is tedious, and the finale takes a long time to bring the story to a close.

Watching it feels like an adult bedtime story, where a child’s awe of the world turns into the anxiety of growing up. The film contrasts heroines from different generations who have endured similar tragedies, showing that a person who has never known protection is incapable of protecting others. Life is no fairy tale, even if the young heroine sometimes thinks otherwise. In this, Adzialilovich remains true to herself—she once again speaks of the adult world, where everything is not as bright and exciting as one might wish, but rather gloomy, sad, full of pain and ugliness.