Stream It Or Skip It: ‘The Ice Tower’ on Shudder, a Slow-Cinema Psychodramatic Fantasy Starring Marion Cotillard

The Ice Tower is a reminder that Shudder isn’t just for slashers and five-hour Chucky documentaries. It’s also a reminder that the “genre” film bucket can be remarkably deep and difficult to define, as director Lucile Hadzihalilovic rather artfully stretches a simple premise into the avenues of psychological thrillers, horror, fairy tales and melodrama, within a slow-cinema methodology. The draw? The pairing of talented newcomer Clara Pacini with Oscar-winning stalwart Marion Cotillard.

The critique? Maybe The Ice Tower is a touch too artsy for its own good. THE ICE TOWER: STREAM IT OR SKIP IT? The Gist: As a narrator (Aurelia Petit) describes the frigid realm of fairy-tale mainstay The Ice Queen — see also: Frozen, The Huntsman: Winter’s War — Jeanne (Pacini) stands at the foot of a snow-covered mountainside.

Perhaps she contemplates running away, but she returns, late for dinner, to her foster home, where she’s surrounded by other, younger orphans. She stares longingly, obsessively, at a postcard of a skating rink. That night, a girl, unable to sleep, awakens Jeanne, who begins reading her the tale of The Ice Queen. As the narrator picks up where she left off, Jeanne packs her rucksack, gives the girl a bead from a precious bracelet to remember her by, and departs, painstakingly crunching through snowy hillsides, occasionally losing her footing and stumbling down icy slopes.

After an arduous journey that included a potentially dangerous hitchhiking encounter, Jeanne arrives at a nearby city and makes her way to the same skating rink in her postcard. She admires the skaters until the rink empties and the music goes quiet and the night goes dark, and a girl who we’ll soon learn is named Bianca (Valentina Vezzoso) chooses not to help Jeanne find a place to stay that night. After a wander, Jeanne breaks into a basement window and meanders through a building until she finds, well, a shimmering garment on the floor, a discarded pile of white fabric covered in sequins. She sleeps on it and awakens to snow falling indoors.

She peers through a crack in the wall and sees Cristina (Cotillard) in full Ice Queen regalia. The snow stops. The director ceases action. And a stagehand with a broom clears out the snow for the next take.

Jeanne departs and watches from a distance as Bianca quarrels with a boy and drops her purse. Jeanne takes it, pockets some coins from a wallet and returns to the film studio.

While helping herself to the catering table, the aforementioned stagehand, Stephanie (Marine Gesbert), asks if Jeanne is an extra. She replies, “Yes,” but then backtracks and tells her the truth (although Jeanne lies that her name is Bianca). Stephanie is kind, giving Jeanne/Bianca an extra jacket. Bianca’s loitering soon finds her being fitted in costume as an extra and getting a front-row view of Cristina’s chilly-diva behavior.

Jeanne/Bianca almost by accident ingratiates herself to the superstar actor, who knows this young woman has been watching her, spying on her from the wardrobe closet. Cristina shows Jeanne/Bianca a tiny sliver of affection, which is a tiny sliver more than she affords most. It soon is revealed that Jeanne/Bianca stole a jewel from Cristina’s costume, and that Cristina found one of the beads from Jeanne/Bianca’s bracelet. “We’re joined now,” Cristina says. What Movies Will It Remind You Of?

Hadzihalilovic draws from Hitchcock’s psychological thrillers and David Lynch’s dreamscapes, and the film gives off a somewhat inexplicable feeling of Dario Argento’s Suspiria with a far chillier color palette. Vibes-wise, think I Saw the TV Glow’s ploddingly paced blurring of fantasy and reality. Performance Worth Watching: Cotillard is captivating here, playing Cristina as someone who absolutely refuses to shatter her mystique.

But those looking for an emotional handhold will find an exceptionally sturdy one in Pacini, who couches her own mystique within Jeanne’s perceived innocence. Sex And Skin: None. Our Take: The Ice Tower is built wholesale from freezing-cold blocks of pure, uncut suggestiveness. Dialogue is sparse, characters are tantalizingly mysterious, and Hadzihalilovic blurs the lines between what’s real, daytime fantasy, nighttime dream and the contents of the film within the film, The Snow Queen, which, at least in the fleeting bits of it we see, makes even less discernible “sense” than the elusive, languid vision of The Ice Tower itself.

I can see a tiny niche of discerning viewers being captivated by this immersive and strange experimentation with narrative and character, underscored by notions of sexual compulsion, emotional neediness and the desire to be seen. Those subliminal qualities feed Cotillard’s characterization of Cristina, who dictatorially controls the “realm” of The Snow Queen production via her whims. She is not a kind person, nor is she beyond reason, at least within the context of one climactic scene. It leads us to wonder if she’s a Method actor who allows The Ice Queen character to dictate her behavior off-set, or if the character is an extension of her “pitiless” personality, reflected in her indifference toward her co-star Chloe’s (Lilas-Rose Gilberti Poisot) struggles during filming.

Contrast Cristina with Jeanne, who seems far less deliberate in her actions, perhaps driven by her subconscious nebulous attraction to the steely actress and her striking confidence. Jeanne is empathetic in her curiosity, which veers directly into naive voyeurism. Her motives are the foggy, uncertain stuff of the young mind, troubled by past tragedies and feeling a need to escape, just escape, more than just “This Bullshit Town” like most restless teenagers, but from harsh realities, the kind that foster empty melancholy and can lead to the darkness and solitude of a metaphorical lonely castle tower in the nigh-lifeless Arctic. Jeanne never had control, so being queen of her own realm certainly has its allure.

Our Call: Be warned, The Ice Tower is aptly glacial in pace. It may test your patience at the same time it subtly and quietly rewards you. STREAM IT. John Serba is a freelance film critic from Grand Rapids, Michigan.

Werner Herzog hugged him once.