‘The Ice Tower’ Review: Cinema Itself Corrupts an Innocent Child, as Marion Cotillard Plays Its Icy Queen

variety.com:

Peter Debruge Chief Film Critic A film set is no place for little girls. In the fairytale-adjacent world of Lucile Hadžihalilović’s frigid dark fantasy “The Ice Tower,” an orphan runs away from her foster home and takes refuge in the basement of a movie studio, finding herself drawn to the production — and its star, played by Marion Cotillard — the way a child in a Hans Christen Anderson story might be lured into the clutches of a wicked enchantress.

Aptly enough, the script they’re shooting is “The Snow Queen,” aspects of which echo through the movie’s many layers, all the way out to us, whom Hadžihalilović hopes to trap in her crystal prism.

Cotillard and Hadžihalilović collaborated once before, early in both their careers, on 2004’s “Innocence,” where the director first planted the unholy seeds she’s still harvesting all these years later: unsettling yet artful projects in which Hadžihalilović depicts the socialization of children according to macabre rituals only their elders seem to understand.

In “Evolution,” she showed boys groomed to bear children, while in “Earwig,” a sinister guardian installed a set of frozen dentures in a girl’s mouth, at the express instruction of a faraway sponsor.