Critics reviews

Pacini and Cotillard are riveting: Pacini with wide-eyed vulnerability, Cotillard with icy command that occasionally cracks to reveal fragility. Together, they crafted a film that is strange, mesmerizing, and cautionary: A study in how fantasy can both drive and consume an innocent soul.

The Ice Tower is the type of picture whose images linger for a long while and, somehow, are transmitted into your dreams... that is the magic of Lucile Hadžihalilović’s cinema.

The Ice Tower is, ultimately, an aesthetic and nostalgic exercise. It’s interested not in emotion but sensation. There’s something humbling, and disarming, in Hadžihalilović salvaging the grandiosity of cinema by trudging through its bare bones...

The Ice Tower is magnificent to look at, so textured and lavish at the same time; the smooth work of cinematographer Jonathan Ricquebourg (The Taste of Things) ensures longer takes are as glacial as winter terrain.

Hadžihalilović perfectly pinpoints the ambiguity of female coming of age, along with all of its attendant promises and perils... The Ice Tower is consistent, luscious and cerebral...

The Ice Tower may feel misguided and messy, but there are some genuinely poignant ideas at the heart of its story.

Lucile Hadžihalilović’s “The Ice Tower” rambles about a dreamlike environment seeking life and lacking a pulse for two hours.

Hadzihalilovic is a director who refuses to compromise her very distinctive vision and that is the case here, even if The Ice Tower... is her biggest film to date; utterly beautiful in every frame with a breakout lead performance by young French actress Clara Pacini.

It is a mesmeric melodrama, mixing sensuality with a teetering anxiety, balancing on a cliff-edge of disaster.

[T]he tinkling score, the sparkling lights and the prismatic motif... all serve to hypnotize. 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.

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.

In terms of mood and tone and its own artifices and surfaces, “The Ice Tower” is a stunner... The understated performances and coolly detached, shivery hypnotic vibes of this film won’t be for anyone looking for a story, but “The Ice Tower” casts a creepy spell that lingers and even deepens in the mind long after it’s over.