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Lucile Hadžihalilović isn't known for conventional scary films, although her neo-noir body-horror movie Earwig nearly fits the bill. However while The Ice Tower doesn't focus on physical terror, it may yet rank as among the year's most unsettling films. Enthusiasts of Alfred Hitchcock should find it mesmerizing — not just due to its unnerving avian assault. (Though this feature certainly adds to the tension.)

An Enthralling Story: Blending Reality and Fantasy

The director's subtle touch ensures The Ice Tower feel like a mythical story: A 15-year-old girl, portrayed by newcomer Clara Pacini, escapes from her care home and slips into a movie production where a re-imagining of Hans Christian Andersen’s The Snow Queen is in production. There, she meets Cristina (brought to life by Marion Cotillard), who portrays the ice queen central to Andersen’s story. Off-screen, the actress exudes cruelty and allure in equal measure — Jeanne is captivated by Cristina. The story that develops as the orphan enters the unreality of moviemaking is a mesmerizing maturation story.

Building the Fantasy: Balancing Reality and Illusion

Many filmmakers who attempt to capture a surreal, dreamlike quality often overstylize or turn their movies into mystery boxes. Hadžihalilović opted for a more straightforward method: ride “the line between reality and fantasy” by returning to Andersen’s source material, in actual and symbolic terms. At the beginning in the film, Jeanne recites his story to a younger orphan, creating an otherworldly atmosphere. When Jeanne winds up in a Snow Queen movie, the filmmaker explains it gave her “a way to escape, to build a world, a universe, that has its own reality and rules."

Our focus was on capturing the constructed elements […] preferring artificial snow over natural, and painted backdrop mountains.

That universe, in The Ice Tower, is deliberately artificial. The film’s artifice becomes uncanny; at times where you could mistake The Ice Tower for a gritty live-action version of Frozen. (And yet, she hasn't, she hasn’t seen the Disney movie.)

A Primal Journey: Escaping into Another World

Jeanne’s fundamental path — a girl fleeing home, and entering a portal into a different realm — adds to the movie’s feel of fantastical horror. The Ice Tower would pair well with Pan’s Labyrinth, with Cotillard filling in for physical creatures. The director wanted Jeanne to see “the Snow Queen for real,” then “little by little become more and more involved in this shooting until the moment she’s inside the story itself.”

That imparts the movie a sense of dream logic, a rhythmic experience that demanded a great amount of care when it came not just to the film’s lush visuals, but to the soundtrack as well. “We tried to make it very expressive and emotional, with not too many elements — we just removed many things, not only in the image, but a lot in the sound,” she says.

Subtle Acting: Cotillard and Pacini’s Dynamic

Marion Cotillard, who initially collaborated with Hadžihalilović two decades ago on Innocence, channels that same pared-down style. “I think she intuitively remembered how I’d like the actors to play this kind of planned or very restrained performance,” she says. Pacini, by contrast, brings a innocent vulnerability to Jeanne’s push-pull relationship with Cristina. Their attraction peaks with what the director calls “the big kiss,” a bizarre, operatic moment she worried might not resonate. “I thought Maybe it’s not going to work,” she admits. But witnessing it during filming made her feel the moment was enchanting: “Wow, there is something in it.”

Dark Origins: Reimagining Andersen’s Fairy Tale

The Ice Tower is not a direct adaptation of The Snow Queen, but Hadžihalilović wound up channeling Andersen’s fairy-tale work, which she describes as “very dark and very violent and very cruel.” She also fractures it with realism, blurring anchoring scenes of harsh reality throughout the script. By the end, much remains unspoken. The director hints that Jeanne may even be “inventing the film within the film,” a subtle implication that everything on screen might be a hallucination.

She lives for the complexities. Her protagonists are more flawed than Andersen’s. There’s more at stake. They’re well-defined, but deeply layered. And yet by reversing traditional fantasy stories, the director aimed to get even nearer to what Andersen did in his day: abandoning the anchor of logic.

“[The Ice Tower] is not realistic at all,” she says with a wry smile. But it is seductive, unique, and profoundly unsettling.

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The Ice Tower opens in select theaters on October 3.