Ever since her first feature, “Innocence” (2005), the French filmmaker Lucile Hadzihalilovic has been fashioning seductive, hermetic worlds, often featuring spellbound children reaching for agency and freedom from controlling adults.
Marrying inexperience and a barely acknowledged eroticism, these films have a dreamlike, almost experimental strangeness. That tone continues with “The Ice Tower,” a darkly allusive fairy tale about obsession and loneliness. Set in the 1970s in a wintry mountain town, and inspired by Hans Christian Andersen’s “The Snow Queen,” the plot follows Jeanne (Clara Pacini), a teenage orphan who runs away from her foster home clutching her dead mother’s beads, which she believes are infused with magical powers.
With nowhere to sleep, Jeanne shelters in a movie studio where a production of “The Snow Queen” is being filmed, and is immediately transfixed by its exquisite star, Cristina (Marion Cotillard). The fascination seems mutual, and soon Jeanne has gained a supporting role and Cristina’s confidence. Is Jeanne looking for a mother, or a lover, or something else? And is Cristina seeking distraction from what appears to be a substance addiction?
Enigmatic and ethereal, “The Ice Tower” answers our questions with dreams and portents. The distorted mirror of the fairy tale is echoed in the camera’s lens, presenting a vision of Cristina that’s pure and alluring instead of temperamental and predatory. There’s menace in this movie’s beautiful illusions, and Hadzihalilovic, who reveres silent cinema, presents some of her most trancelike scenes — like a lovely young woman skating to “It’s Five O’Clock” by Aphrodite’s Child — entirely without dialogue.
Featuring tiny but tangy performances by August Diehl and Gaspar Noé (the director’s husband and creative collaborator), “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.
The Ice Tower
Not rated. In French, with subtitles. Running time: 1 hour 57 minutes. In theaters.
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