The Ice Tower () is a 2025 fantasy drama film directed by Lucile Hadà ¾ihaliloviàfrom a screenplay she co-wrote with Geoff Cox. Set in the 1970s, it stars Marion Cotillard as an actress who is shooting a film adaptation of Hans Christian Andersen's fairy tale The Snow Queen, in which she plays the title character, and Clara Pacini as a runaway teenage orphan who becomes infatuated with the actress. The cast also includes August Diehl and Gaspar Noé in supporting roles. A co-production between France, Germany and Italy, the film had its world premiere at the 75th Berlin International Film Festival on 16 February 2025, where it won the Silver Bear for Outstanding Artistic Contribution.
The Ice Tower received generally positive reviews from critics. It was ranked number 18 on Sight and Sound's list of "50 best films of 2025", and it also won the awards for Best Film and Best Production Design at the 2025 Neuchâtel Fantastic Film Festival, and the Zabaltegi-Tabakalera Award at the 2025 San Sebastián Film Festival. It was released theatrically in France by Metropolitan Filmexport on 17 September 2025, and in Germany by Grandfilm on 18 December 2025.
In the 1970s, the enigmatic actress Cristina is shooting a film adaptation of Hans Christian Andersen's fairy tale The Snow Queen, in which she plays the title character. At the same time, Jeanne, a runaway teenage orphan, takes refuge in the studio where the film is being shot and falls under Cristina's spell, and a mutual fascination grows between them.
On 20 March 2017, Cineuropa reported that Lucile Hadà ¾ihaliloviàwas finishing the screenplay for her next film, (The Snow Queen), which had been selected by Groupe Ouest as one of the eight projects that would benefit from a writing coaching programme in Brittany that year. Hadà ¾ihaliloviàco-wrote the screenplay with Geoff Cox, with whom she had collaborated in ÃÂvolution (2015) and Earwig (2021).
On 22 June 2023, ARTE France announced that it would co-produce the film, now titled (The Ice Tower) and starring Marion Cotillard, with Metropolitan Filmexport set to distribute it, and that shooting would take place in France and Germany between January and February 2024.
The film was co-produced by France's 3B Productions, Germany's Sutor Kolonko, and Italy's Albolina Film. The crew includes Jonathan Ricquebourg as the director of photography, Julia Irribarria as set designer, and costumes made by Laurence Benoit.
The word "glace" in the original French title () means both "ice" and "mirror". Cristina and Jeanne mirror each other throughout the film. Hadà ¾ihaliloviàtold Filmmaker Magazine in February 2025: <blockquote>It was clear from the script that what happens in the film-within-the-film is, in fact, a continuation of what happened to Jeanne in real life, on the set. Similarly, what happens between her and Cristina mirrors what happens in the film. It's the same story which is being told sometimes in reality, sometimes in the film-within-the-film, or maybe in Jeanne's dreams at some point. Maybe she's the one who created the film-within-the-film? Together with [cinematographer] Jonathan Ricquebourg we decided that The Snow Queen [the film they were shooting in the film], shouldn't look too differently from our film. So the link, or the frontier of reality, would be blurred with the help of very slight differences. But still, I knew that I was going to edit it as a mix between reality and film: for example, now we are looking at Jeanne looking at the set, etc. What I wanted was to blur the frontier so there is emotional continuity.</blockquote>
On 22 June 2023, ARTE France announced that Marion Cotillard would star in the film, marking her second collaboration with Hadà ¾ihalilovià20 years after starring in her feature directorial debut, Innocence (2004). Clara Pacini (in her first feature film), August Diehl, Gaspar Noé, Lilas-Rose Gilberti Poisot, Raphael Reboul, Wilhelm Bonnelle, Marine Gesbert and Dounia Sichov later joined the cast.
Hadà ¾ihaliloviàsaid she thought it would be funny to cast Noé, her longtime collaborator and real-life partner, as a director completely unlike himself. Noé's only condition to appear in the film was to wear a wig in it. He told Hadà ¾ihaliloviàthat he would do the film for free if he could wear a wig.
Hadà ¾ihaliloviàtold Variety about the film's inspirations: "We thought a lot about VÃÂctor Erice's The Spirit of the Beehive (1973), which transfigures reality through the eyes of a youth. And we tried to do the same â embellishing and stylizing, experiencing this world through the young girl's eyes by making the mundane a bit more enchanted." The Snow Queen dress that fascinates Jeanne was inspired by the costumes in A Midsummer Night's Dream (1935).
On 2 October 2025, Hadà ¾ihaliloviàshared with Letterboxd a list of 10 films that inspired The Ice Tower with accompanying notes that read:
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Principal photography began in Paris on 7 January 2024, and wrapped in March 2024. Filming also took place in Yvelines between February and March 2024, and in the city of Bolzano in Northern Italy, between late February and late March 2024.
The Ice Tower had its world premiere at the 75th Berlin International Film Festival in official competition on 16 February 2025. The film was released theatrically in France by Metropolitan Filmexport on 17 September 2025. International sales are handled by Goodfellas. The film was shown in a special silent screening at the Brussels International Fantastic Film Festival on 17 April 2025.
On 18 February 2025, Yellow Veil Pictures acquired North American distribution rights to the film and released it theatrically in the United States on 3 October 2025. BFI Distribution released the film in the United Kingdom on 21 November 2025, and later made it available for streaming on BFI Player on 12 January 2026. Movies Inspired will release it in Italy and Bir Film will release it in Turkey. The film was released in Germany by Grandfilm on 18 December 2025.
The official poster and the official trailer for the film were released on 5 August 2025.
The Ice Tower received generally positive reviews from critics. The film holds a 80% "Certified Fresh" score on review aggregator Rotten Tomatoes, based on 54 reviews. The site's "critics consensus" reads: "Gorgeous as frost and just as brittle, The Ice Tower occasionally wobbles as a narrative but largely excels as an atmospheric meditation on the creative process." On Metacritic, the film has a weighted average score of 79 out of 100 based on reviews from 16 critics, indicating "generally favorable reviews". AlloCiné, a French cinema site, gave the film an average rating of 3.5/5, based on a survey of 24 French reviews.
Peter Bradshaw of The Guardian gave the film 5 stars and wrote: "an eerie and unwholesome spell is cast in this film; it is a fairytale of death-wish yearning and erotic submission. It wittily fuses the real and the fictional into a trance-state â and that's the state that I've sometimes found a little static in previous films by Lucile Hadà ¾ihaliloviÃÂ, but not here. Dreamily strange it might be (and in fact, on the face of it, entirely preposterous) this movie had me gripped with its two outstanding lead performances â from Marion Cotillard and newcomer Clara Pacini â and a clamorous musical score." Bradshaw added about Gaspar Noé's character: "Cristina's somewhat louche director Dino, played by cameo by Hadzihalilovic's partner Gaspar Noé, is in the habit of telling likely young actresses that he might cast them in his next project, a Hitchcockian thriller. In fact, there is something Hitchcockian in this shoot, with an attack carried out by a bird, and in Cristina's own cold, cruel detachment from the victim's suffering. Hadzihalilovic might intend us to notice in one shot a movie poster for The Red Shoes, but the Powell/Pressburger film that this more resembles is surely Black Narcissus with its female desire and delirium in the bitter mountain cold."
Jordan Mintzer of The Hollywood Reporter called it "an artsy fable for adults", "a twisted retro fairytale that sits somewhere between Frozen (2013) and Mulholland Drive (2001)", and added: "As the film-within-a-film's famous star, Cotillard doesn't need to say much to make her presence felt. Shot in soft light like the Chanel fashion icon she now is, the actress emits a Garbo or Dietrich-like aura, terrifying those around her â especially the young extras forced to play in her scenes â with temper tantrums that are quelled, it seems, by heroin or some other drug that a doctor (August Diehl) administers to her between takes."
Jennie Kermode of Eye for Film wrote: "Cotillard is at her very best as a character we see only from the sidelines â earthy and opinionated in flashes, yet frozen by her art."
Elisa Guimarães of Collider wrote: "With a pacing that is more on the slower side and that, thus, might scare off some viewers, The Ice Tower is nevertheless a potent picture about coming of age in a world that isn't necessarily kind to us or our fantasies." Guimarães also praised Jonathan Ricquebourg's cinematography: "every single shot of The Ice Tower looks like a painting, or, rather, like an illustration from a very modern fairy tale book. Combining grainy images with a soft focus, Ricquebourg not only makes the movie seem like a product of the time in which it takes placeâÂÂthe late 60sâÂÂbut also makes everything feel like a dream."
Isaac Feldberg of RogerEbert.com gave the film 4 stars and wrote: "Femininity exerts a powerfully unsettling pull in the work of Lucile Hadà ¾ihaliloviÃÂ, a French auteur who's never made a film of such coruscating, crystalline beauty as "The Ice Tower," a hypnotic meditation on the enchantment that develops between an impressionable teenage runaway and the imperious film actress whose set she stumbles first onto, then into. [...] Hadà ¾ihaliloviàsuffuses this story with a languid menace, as if inducing hypnagogic near-slumber and still holding us under, even as the oxygen starts to run thin and what materializes from the ether begins to scare us." Feldberg also praised the film's leading actresses, saying: "it's a testament to the vividly expressive performance of newcomer PaciniâÂÂas well as a master class by Cotillard, whose immortal movie-star allure is charged here with almost vampiric malevolence at pointsâÂÂthat "The Ice Tower" sustains its trance-like melodrama across a rigorously slow-burning 118 minutes."
Mexican film director Guillermo del Toro praised The Ice Tower calling it a "tremendous film".
The Ice Tower was ranked number 18 on Sight and Sound's list of the "50 best films of 2025".