The Ice Tower

Lucile Hadžihalilović has made four features in twenty-five years — Innocence, Evolution, Earwig and now La Tour de glace — each of them a closed, humid system with children inside it and something unexplained going on at the edges. This one premiered in competition at the Berlinale in 2025 and took the Silver Bear for Outstanding Artistic Contribution, an award Todd Haynes's jury gave to the film's whole creative ensemble rather than a single craftsperson.

The setting is a 1970s film studio, and the film Hadžihalilović builds around it is partly a period reconstruction — sodium light, fake snow, cigarettes, the physical apparatus of analogue cinema — and partly a fairy tale that has slipped its moorings. Marion Cotillard plays the actress in the Snow Queen's costume; Clara Pacini, in her first role, plays the runaway who watches her. August Diehl and, in a small joke of casting, Gaspar Noé as the director round out the crew. Jonathan Ricquebourg's photography does much of the work the Silver Bear citation was pointing at.

It divided viewers more than it divided critics: a Certified Fresh consensus and a place at number eighteen on Sight & Sound's fifty best films of the year, set against audience scores that suggest a fair number of people found it opaque. That gap is characteristic of Hadžihalilović, who has never made a film that explains itself, and it also went on to take the Zabaltegi-Tabakalera Award at San Sebastián.