Lucile Hadžihalilović is a good bet for the most underrated director on the planet. She’s only made four features in 20 years, but with obsessive consistency each time: an exquisitely controlled hermetic world that exudes weird biological and psychological anxieties – from the pre-pubescent prep school of 2004’s Innocence, to the island hospital nurturing impregnated boys in 2015’s Evolution. These microcosms, governed by their own internal laws, seem to exist in some far-off arthouse realm indifferent to regular cinema.
But her new film, The Ice Tower, makes the coyest of glances towards commercial territory by rooting itself in Hans Christian Andersen. “Vast, immense, glittering like ice was the realm of the Snow Queen,” lullabies Marion Cotillard in the preamble; the story is the preferred bedtime reading of teenage orphan Jeanne (Clara Pacini), who escapes from her foster home, heads down the mountain, and stows away on a film production of the fairytale. The queen is being played by imperious diva Cristina van der Berg (who is played for us by none other than la Cotillard).
