We round up the reviews for Lucile Hadžihalilović’s film, released in cinemas on the 21st November.
The Guardian: ***** “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 – and that’s the state that I’ve sometimes found a little static in previous films by Lucile Hadžihalilović, but not here.”
UK Film Review.co.uk: **** “While decidedly imperfect – at this stage in cinema’s evolution, it’s such a wonderful and hopeful thing to see art films continue to push the boundaries of storytelling and shot construction. And that’s a spirit which feels present throughout this movie’s running length. If you enjoy films which merge the fantastical with the meditative, and the cinematically glacial (no pun intended) with the surreal – then this might very well be your jam. It was most certainly mine.”
Roger Ebert.com: **** “A commonality in these coming-of-age allegories has been Hadžihalilović’s focus on invariably prepubescent protagonists who are doomed to remain suspended, as if in amniotic fluid, unless they can rupture the membrane of that which arrests their development. With this fourth feature, Hadžihalilović has fashioned what might be her most accessible film to date. But in her oneiric film language, she still asks sidelong questions about the surreal process of self-perception. Collapsing the uncanny enchanted realism of her film-within-the-film with Jeanne’s delirium in the face of such artifice, she shows us the dream within the fairy tale. This is not so much a film you watch as one you wake up from, shivering.”
The Film Experience: “With that in mind, it’s fair to say that, while The Ice Tower feels notably narrative and character-driven in the context of Hadžihalilović’s oeuvre, it still comes down to the same mesmeric rhythms, styles, and preoccupations of her other work. Crucially, it also returns to their foremost principle – cinema as nightmare.”
Screen Daily: “To call The Ice Tower ‘conventional’ would be something of a stretch, but there is none of the wanton oddness of, say, Earwig. There a girl had actual teeth of ice; here, the icy heart of Cotillard’s jaded, damaged movie star Cristina is more metaphorical.”
The Hollywood Reporter: “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 — especially the young extras forced to play in her scenes — with temper tantrums that are quelled, it seems, by heroin or some other drug that a doctor (August Diehl) administers to her between takes.”
Deadline: “The Ice Tower is full of brilliantly conceived and rendered pathways that end in cul-de-sacs; it is beguiling, but hardly satisfying. It is always a pleasure to watch Marion Cotillard piece together a character; she has an extraordinary ability to appear regally impassive and clearly be very troubled at the same time. It is a pleasure just to look at her. But it’s not enough.”
Variety: “It can start to feel quite tedious, unless you allow your brain to engage with the movie on an almost subconscious level. That’s where the incredible attention paid to crafts — the cinematography, sets, costumes and sound design — kick in at last, and “The Ice Tower” becomes a sort of reverie in which we just might see ourselves reflected.”