NZIFF Round Table Reviews: The Ice Tower

WEB EXCLUSIVE | REVIEW | NZIFF 

This is part of a series of roundtable discussions and extended dialogues conducted by Ricky Lai (@rickthelai), Trevor Pronoso (@CleverGurl), Madeline Smith (@prime4illusion), and Caeden Tipler (@ctipler) on films that have premiered at NZIFF 2026.

The Ice Tower (2025)

dir. Lucile Hadžihalilović

France, 117 mins

The following exchange is between Ricky and Trevor on Lucile Hadžihalilović's latest film, The Ice Tower.

Ricky: Bear with me here. In the Nintendo 64 adventure-platforming game Banjo-Kazooie, the hub world is set in the villainous lair of Gruntilda the Witch, with a geographically impossible labyrinth of tunnels and crevasses, leading to a wide range of themed lobbies for the next level. There's a shipwreck that takes you to the beach world, a bayou that takes you to the swamp world, and even an exit at an impossibly high altitude that brings you to a cemetery (it will take you to a haunted manor). In Rareware's sequel to the game, Banjo-Tooie, the entire lair is in ruins, with the entrance to that network of worlds bouldered off. When I was much younger, I would swivel the game's camera around as far as possible and strain it against the wall, hoping to catch a glimpse of what might lie out of bounds. To see if the worlds from the first game still exist behind that blockade. What might the beach world, swamp world or haunted manor look like now? Are they in ruins, too?

I don't mean to mislead you into thinking The Ice Tower is like an adventure-platformer game. It is primarily about cinema and the ways it can beguile and disappoint you. The film resembles, at first, a Narnia fantasy, if not for the blankets of prop snow, then the willing escape into fiction. The '20-year-old Bianca' (not her real identity, but the 'avatar' she assumes) wanders into a soundstage to discover that her favourite fairy tale (The Snow Queen) is being adapted for film. Subsequently, she becomes infatuated with the megalomaniacal actress at the centre, Cristina van der Berg. The artificial set-within-a-set of The Ice Tower is resplendently gorgeous—perhaps even too pristine in all its symmetry—but Hadžihalilović explores how this fantastical hideaway can become extremely forbidding, or to me, locating which points the avatar reaches the bounds of the level and can go no further. I specifically think of the artificial overhead lights on a fabricated woodland trail in Innocence (2004). The Ice Tower's set is designed, and its production is ruled petulantly by its very own White Witch, so there's an implicit sense that even Bianca's desire to escape reality through this artifice has its limits, also. The simulation has an agenda of its own. We spend far more time outside the set—stairwells, corridors, backrooms—than in the ice world itself. There is one sequence for which Bianca explores the set of The Snow Queen, beckoned by the opaque, black void of the tower's door, and must resort to imagining the interior instead. This is what struck me about the sequence where Cristina's chauffeur drives her and Bianca—honestly reminiscent of Lost Highway (1997)—to a snowy cliffside: the edge of this world. Bianca isn't ready yet to discover what lies beyond those bounds.

I'm not quite sure if what I'm saying about The Ice Tower is entirely cogent or even relevant; there are clearly themes with greater prevalence: performance, innocence, role models, adult disappointment, and so on. But I felt like the specific ways I would project my imagination onto fiction (e.g. video games) as a child were seen, which is also apt for a film actually built on the motif of 'being seen'. Bianca spies on her idol through cracks in the set walls, and later she sneaks into Cristina's dressing room and peeks from behind the folding screen. The fan is never discovered, and yet somehow Cristina reveals that she did, in fact, see Bianca behind the walls, watching like a rat. That's so fascinating. How could you possibly be seen by something that's not watching you?

Trevor: I'm genuinely fascinated by the Banjo-Kazooie comparison. It's one of those compulsions that I find so millennial and zoomer-coded, but no less powerful. For most of video games' history, it's precisely been the opposite: movies have been the main inspiration and driver of video games' generic forms (a horror game, a WW2 game, a Battle Royale game) since their inception, yet it's starting to influence our ways of critically engaging with film. My first exposure to critically connecting video games with cinema was through Machinima—the art of making movies through video game textures and recorded gameplay. But what I still find nascently fascinating—I haven't done any deep dives into this idea yet—is the concept of cinematically capturing your avatar's algorithmic interactions with a given game's NPCs and purposefully substituting the linear narrative of the game with one's own 'narrative' by reordering these video events through editing software. Because the visual end product of a video game and a 'video file' of captured gameplay of that same game are virtually identical, you can pretty much swap out bits and pieces of the 'cutscenes' and recorded gameplay and reorder them to the whims of your (Machinima) vision.

The comparison I want to make is that The Ice Tower repeatedly blurs the line between diegetic reality and the film rushes of the production of 'The Ice Queen', which are not that dissimilar formally (from the perspective of Hadžihalilović, who arranges the narrative continuity of these scenes during post-production). We, the audience, can't discern which scenes are diegetic and which are Bianca's psychological projections because the filmic textures are nearly identical; Machinima thus gains its resonance by encouraging an intertextual reading of its formal end product. In other words, if you've played a video game and know its linear progression of cutscenes and gameplay mechanics, watching a machinima of said video game introduces moments of recognition and subsequent subversion of its visuo-ludogic codes. One stage/level near the beginning of a video game becomes intercut with a later stage/level through the edit. The cutting of Machinima allows you to metatextually interrogate the formation of a specific scene (i.e. positioning the camera angle of a shot in the video game world) against its newfound metaphorical/figurative meaning as interpreted by the filmmaker. I don't think comparing your experience watching this film to that of a video game is that bizarre, since The Ice Tower also invites intertextual readings (it's based on the Hans Christian Anderson story, given Hadžihalilović's auteur sensibilities).

Your comparison of trying to access the out-of-bounds areas of Banjo-Kazooie to Bianca's exploration of the film set (and her negotiations of perspective and performance afforded by the spaces both inside and outside the set) is spot-on. You could describe The Ice Tower as a 'coming-of-age' film in the most vulgar and French way possible lmao; even then, it is motivated by this desire to break away from its cocoon, to transcend its constricting diegetic (and filmically generic) conventions because they remain insufficient and inappropriate in communicating our true desires and passions. Every interaction between Bianca and Cristina is an Epstein case file waiting to be leaked in 40+ years; Bianca traversing the Alps just to leave her despondent and unfulfilling foster home, the magical and ravishing set design for The Ice Queen feels other-worldly and hyperreal than Bianca's boring and pathetic squatting in and around nooks and corners of the film studio. It's a fantasy that lays out its contours and limits on the surface, fairly explicitly, to Bianca (and the audience). Yet, we still desire to enmesh ourselves within it. Realising that Gruntilda the Witch's lair has mostly been closed off in Banjo-Tooie is realising the lack that has always been there in Banjo-Kazooie. Bianca's fascination with the Ice Queen only accentuates her feelings of lack rather than fulfilling them.

Ricky: Couldn't be more stoked that you entertained that ludologic reading so strongly. The relative simplicity of the fantasy distilling the ice kingdom to one big flat exterior surrounded by walls, a doorway and an interior space, allows for a lot of personal projection, which, of course, is poignant in turn because it is such a limited space to begin with. The fantasy has real-life limits, but the repressed desires are so all-encompassing that, by the end, Cristina is basically trying to swallow Bianca. The ending feels so deflating after contemplating these possibilities—Bianca's abrupt loss of innocence rhymes with her implied return to the orphanage from which she escaped, but the film opts instead to show her image trapped within the surface of the ice crystal, much like the many other extras, sharing her age, whom she saw trapped beneath the tower's frozen moat.