{"id":272864,"date":"2025-10-02T21:32:11","date_gmt":"2025-10-02T21:32:11","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/272864\/"},"modified":"2025-10-02T21:32:11","modified_gmt":"2025-10-02T21:32:11","slug":"behind-the-horror-version-of-frozen","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/272864\/","title":{"rendered":"Behind the horror version of Frozen"},"content":{"rendered":"

Lucile Had\u017eihalilovi\u0107 doesn\u2019t make horror films in a traditional sense, though her neo-noir body-horror movie Earwig may come closest. But while The Ice Tower<\/a> isn’t body horror, it still may be one of 2025\u2019s creepiest films. Fans of David Lynch and Alfred Hitchcock should go gaga \u2014 and not just because of its eerie bird attack. (Though that element doesn\u2019t hurt.)<\/p>\n

Had\u017eihalilovi\u0107\u2019s delicate touch makes The Ice Tower play like a fairy tale: A 15-year-old girl named Jeanne, played by newcomer Clara Pacini, runs away from her orphanage and slips into a film set where a re-imagining of Hans Christian Andersen\u2019s The Snow Queen is being shot. There, she meets Cristina (Inception<\/a>\u2019s Marion Cotillard), who portrays the ice queen at the heart of Andersen\u2019s story. Off-screen, the movie star radiates cruelty and allure in equal measure \u2014 Jeanne can\u2019t look away from Cristina. What unfolds as the orphan descends into the unreality of moviemaking is a hypnotic coming-of-age story.<\/p>\n

Many filmmakers who try to achieve a Lynchian dream tone tend to overstylize or turn their movies into mystery boxes. Had\u017eihalilovi\u0107 had a simpler approach: ride \u201cthe line between reality and fantasy\u201d by going back to Andersen\u2019s source material, literally and figuratively. Early in the film, Jeanne reads his story to a younger orphan, creating an otherworldly atmosphere. When Jeanne winds up in a Snow Queen movie, Had\u017eihalilovi\u0107 says it gave her \u201ca way to escape, to build a world, a universe, that has its own reality and rules.”<\/p>\n

That universe, in The Ice Tower, is deliberately unreal. \u201cWe were much more excited by filming the artificiality [\u2026] the fake snow rather than the real snow, and the fake mountains painted in the background,\u201d Had\u017eihalilovi\u0107 explains. The film\u2019s artifice becomes uncanny; there are times where you could mistake The Ice Tower for the gritty live-action remake of Frozen. (And yet, no, she hasn\u2019t seen the Disney movie.)<\/p>\n

Jeanne\u2019s primal journey \u2014 a girl fleeing home, and stepping through a portal into another world \u2014 adds to the movie\u2019s aura of fantastical horror. The Ice Tower would pair well with Pan\u2019s Labyrinth, with Cotillard filling in for Guillermo del Toro<\/a>\u2019s literal monsters. Had\u017eihalilovi\u0107 wanted Jeanne to see \u201cthe Snow Queen for real,\u201d then \u201clittle by little become more and more involved in this shooting until the moment she\u2019s inside the story itself.\u201d<\/p>\n

That gives the movie a sense of dream logic, a rhythmic sensation that Had\u017eihalilovi\u0107 says required a great amount of care when it came not just to the film\u2019s lush visuals, but to the soundtrack as well. \u201cWe tried to make it very expressive and emotional, with not too many elements \u2014 we just removed many things, not only in the image, but a lot in the sound,\u201d she says.<\/p>\n

\"Jeanne
\n Image: Yellow Veil Pictures<\/p>\n

Cotillard, who first worked with Had\u017eihalilovi\u0107 two decades ago on Innocence, channels that same pared-down style. \u201cI think she intuitively remembered how I\u2019d like the actors to play this kind of planned or very restrained performance,\u201d Had\u017eihalilovi\u0107 says. Pacini, by contrast, brings a wide-eyed vulnerability to Jeanne\u2019s push-pull relationship with Cristina. The magnetism culminates in what Had\u017eihalilovi\u0107 calls \u201cthe big kiss,\u201d a grotesque, operatic moment she worried might fall flat. \u201cI thought Maybe it\u2019s not going to work,\u201d she admits. But seeing it on set made her feel the moment was magical: \u201cWow, there is something in it.\u201d<\/p>\n

The Ice Tower is not a direct adaptation of The Snow Queen, but Had\u017eihalilovi\u0107 wound up channeling Andersen\u2019s fairy-tale work, which she calls \u201cvery dark and very violent and very cruel.\u201d She also fractures it with reality, blurring grounding moments of harsh reality throughout the script. By the end, plenty is left unsaid. The director teases that Jeanne may even be \u201cinventing the film within the film,\u201d a subtle suggestion that everything on screen might be a hallucination.<\/p>\n

Had\u017eihalilovi\u0107 lives for the complications. Her characters are messier than Andersen\u2019s. There\u2019s more at stake. They\u2019re solid, but psychologically complex. And yet by inverting traditional fantasy stories, Had\u017eihalilovi\u0107 hoped to get even closer to what Andersen did in his day: abandoning the anchor of logic.<\/p>\n

\u201c[The Ice Tower] is not realistic at all,\u201d she says with a wry smile. But it is seductive, unusual, and absolutely chilling.<\/p>\n

The Ice Tower opens in select theaters on Oct. 3.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Lucile Had\u017eihalilovi\u0107 doesn\u2019t make horror films in a traditional sense, though her neo-noir body-horror movie Earwig may come…\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":272865,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[28],"tags":[171,53,67,132,68],"class_list":{"0":"post-272864","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-movies","8":"tag-entertainment","9":"tag-movies","10":"tag-united-states","11":"tag-unitedstates","12":"tag-us"},"share_on_mastodon":{"url":"","error":""},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/272864","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/3"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=272864"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/272864\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/272865"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=272864"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=272864"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=272864"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}