I felt mesmerised for two straight hours by this dreamlike fairytale from Lucile Hadzihalilovic. As I was walking out though, there was more than one person who said, “oh I would give that zero stars. I feel sorry that people spent money on it. That was so awful.”

It’s not surprising that Hadzihalilovic’s work is divisive. She often gives us stories and settings that are dreamlike and ambiguous and can ask a lot of an audience to find and maintain any narrative thread. I’ve only seen two others of her movies, Innocence and Evolution. I saw Evolution at my first full MIFF 10 years ago and looking at my review, I loved its surreal qualities but struggled with some of the narrative coherence.

With The Ice Tower, she brings back Marion Cotillard and bases the story around Hans Christian Anderson‘s The Snow Queen. It’s fine if you don’t know that story because we are given insight into it from the start as young foster child Jeanne (Clara Pacini) reads it to her foster sister. Jeanne is a dreamer, wanting more from her life. One night she runs away to the city, intrigued by a postcard she has of an ice skating rink. There she watches a girl skating and then breaks into a building to find a place to sleep.

Her hidey hole turns out to be behind the scenery of a film studio and, as she peeks through the cracks between the scenery, she sees Christina (Cotillard) playing the snow queen. Jeanne is an opportunist and talks her way into being an extra in the film.

It’s one of those films where the plot is not terribly important. I say this because it is really mirroring the story of The Snow Queen but it is doing it in a way that makes us ponder on how the loss of a parent affects us, what grief might do to your ability to love and have empathy, and where we might draw the line between dreams and reality.

It’s a really quiet film, it’s not often that there is music and this makes it feel all the more dreamlike. We are often in scenes of the film, or dreams of the film, with hazy blue tinged monochromatic ice and snowy landscapes. There are interchanges of characters with the people playing them, substitution of Jeanne for the actor Chloe playing the role of the young girl, and a blurring of the line between Christina the actor with the snow queen.

It feels like it’s not so much a story as a mood and I love the way Hadzihalilovic is able to immerse us in a world that is familiar but also off-kilter. It feels like we are in a nether world, maybe the world of a fairytale, maybe a place in eastern Europe in the 70s, somewhere that displaces us from warmth and safety and familiarity.

Cotillard is really great, as you believe her as a washed-up and bitter actor and as a queen with heart of ice. Hadzihalilovic cast her husband, director Gasper Noé, in the film which for all the film buffs is a little bit of fun. The film belongs to Cotillard and new comer Pacini though, you can’t take your eyes away from them.