The Ice Tower

Enigmatic French auteur — are there any other kind? — Lucile Hadžihalilović (Earwig, Evolution) makes arthouse flicks skirting the line between fantasy and horror. Happily, her latest is her most accessible. Not that she’s gone mainstream.

Just as Black Swan made Swan Lake its jumping-off point, Hadžihalilović and co-writer Geoff Cox use The Snow Queen to frame a new tale of enchantment and innocence lost. At her foster home, Jeanne (Clara Pacini) reads the book to a young pal. After running away, she falls on the ice and hits her head. Later, when she stumbles upon the shoot of a Snow Queen adaptation — a lovely moment of fact bleeding into fiction — and star Cristina (Marion Cotillard) starts to mould Jeanne in her own image, it feels preordained, like a bedtime story you’ve heard before.

It takes us to a place of almost Lynchian abstraction.

Although the pace may be too glacial for some, Cotillard is magnetic as the imperious, casually cruel Cristina, and Pacini is so expressive, you really feel Jeanne’s need to belong. Hadžihalilović’s partner, the filmmaker Gaspar Noé (Irreversible), has a witty cameo as a pompous director.

For a film about world-building, it’s beautifully put together, with a score that speaks of dark spells and crumbling ice, and seamless special effects that draw Jeanne into the film within a film. Or is it a dream within a dream? We’re never sure. Rich with fairy-tale symbolism (sparkling jewels, sleeping beauties, blood on snow), it takes us — and Jeanne — to a place of almost Lynchian abstraction.

Perhaps the best way to understand it is as a film of doubles. Jeanne borrows the name of an ice-skating girl she admires, Bianca (“white” in Italian), then becomes a stand-in on the film set, just as Cristina stands in for her mother. It’s no accident that glace in French means both “ice” and “mirror” — and as Jeanne steps through the looking-glass into a fantasy world, there’s no choice but to follow.