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‘The Ice Tower’ Review: Marion Collitard Plays A Manipulative Snow Queen In Lucile Hadzihalilovic’s ’70s Fairytale — Berlin Film Festival


'The Ice Tower' is full of brilliantly conceived and rendered pathways that end in cul-de-sacs; it is beguiling, but hardly satisfying.

In her last film, Earwig, her central character was a browbeaten little girl without teeth who had to submit to wearing ice dentures, suspended from a cruel metal frame, all day. Like Andersen’s story, The Ice Tower centers on a girl on a quest, a framework that in the original can be read — as in many fairytales — as a mythologizing of the heroine’s growth into womanhood. Girls trying to learn to negotiate the world, repressive institutions in cavernous spaces and obscurely malevolent authority figures, all suffused in an atmosphere of menace, are her recurring motifs.

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Berlin Film Festival

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