Lucile Hadžihalilović has always treated perception as an act of danger, and The Ice Tower continues that fascination. Loosely inspired by Hans Christian Andersen’s The Snow Queen, the film reimagines the fairy tale through a poetic, existential frame.
For Jeanne, a 15-year-old orphan played with heartbreaking restraint by Clara Pacini, mirrors are not tools but traps, each reflection turning her reality inside out.
Set in an isolated mountain orphanage, Jeanne’s daily routine unfolds against an eerie quiet. The snow that covers every surface begins to feel more like a curtain than a comfort. Hadžihalilović uses this stillness to create unease.
Jeanne climbs the frozen mountains and stares at distant city lights as if measuring the distance between who she is and who she wishes to become. Her dreams fixate on an ice rink she glimpses from afar, a space shimmering with freedom and artistry, an image that becomes both her salvation and her undoing.
When she slips on a mountain slope and tumbles into a new life, it feels less like an accident and more like a surrender. She follows the glittering lights to the ice rink, where reality bends.
There she encounters Bianca, an elegant skater performed by Valentina Vezzoso, whose grace fascinates Jeanne but whose cold refusal sends her wandering alone. That night, breaking into an abandoned shed, Jeanne dreams of a visit from the Snow Queen herself, played with spectral allure by Marion Cotillard.
From this point, the Ice Tower stops resembling a fairy tale and begins questioning how stories consume the women within them.
Between Fantasy and Film: The Duality of Jeanne
At its surface, Hadžihalilović’s film is a fantasy, but it soon folds upon itself. Jeanne wakes to discover that her magical encounter was part of a film shoot. The queen is not a queen but Cristina, an actress playing a role. This revelation splits the story open.
Jeanne, desperate for identity, slips into Bianca’s life by stealing her identification. When she presents herself to the film crew, they mistake her for the skater, and suddenly Jeanne becomes the person she has envied.
This act of self-reinvention is framed as both liberation and loss. Cristina welcomes her as something between a protégé and a shadow. Their relationship carries the tenderness of mentorship but the toxicity of control. Cotillard plays Cristina with a serene cruelty, beautiful, distant, and quietly manipulative.
Hadžihalilović’s storytelling refuses easy answers. Her pacing is deliberate, sometimes frustratingly so, reflecting the slow current of dreams. But every image invites contemplation.
Through Jonathan Ricquebourg’s cinematography, long corridors resemble frozen veins, half-lit mirrors appear like portals, and snowflakes drift softly across shot windows.
Olivier Messiaen’s haunting score deepens that mood with echoes that seem to breathe in the quiet. The music never overwhelms; instead, it slips beneath the surface, guiding the audience through Jeanne’s fragile awakening.
Each sound and silence builds toward a confrontation that barely arrives, because the truth Hadžihalilović seeks is not found in revelation but in reflection.
Identity, Art, and the Fear of Becoming Someone Else
At its emotional core, The Ice Tower examines how identity is performed, borrowed, and often stolen. Jeanne’s transformation into Bianca is not just a lie; it is an experiment in survival. Without family, she tests whether adopting another’s reflection can fill the void of belonging.
The Ice Tower (Credit: 3B Productions)
For Cristina, who lost her own childhood to ambition and fame, Jeanne becomes a mirror of her younger self. Both characters cling to illusions to escape pain.
This dynamic mirrors films such as Persona or 8½, yet Hadžihalilović avoids psychological acrobatics. She grounds the story in quiet human behavior: lingering glances, withheld words, and gestures that tremble between affection and harm.
The result feels intimate and distant all at once, capturing the paradox of looking too closely at oneself through another’s eyes.
The film also meditates on performance as an act of erasure. Jeanne’s every step toward becoming Bianca strips away a part of her original identity. Her imitation of elegance becomes a prison. The movie’s title, The Ice Tower, embodies that paradox, both majestic and isolating, built from fragile beauty that melts when touched.
By the final act, Jeanne has learned that mirrors can wound as much as they reveal. The set’s artificial decorations, glittering ice walls, and velvet blues, along with projected snow, mirror the emotional artifice of the industry itself.
Hadžihalilović suggests that filmmaking, like the fairy tales it adapts, can distort truth in the pursuit of beauty. Yet within that distortion lies an uncomfortable authenticity: our obsession with self-image often leads to losing the very self we seek to define.
A Beautifully Frozen Reflection on Self-Perception
The Ice Tower resists easy classification. It is part dream, part critique, and part coming-of-age tragedy. Its pace may feel glacial to some viewers, yet within each measured frame lies poetry.
The snow-covered stillness hides a storm of emotion. Jeanne is both a victim and creator of her illusions, and by the film’s final moments, it leaves us unsure whether she has woken from a dream or become part of someone else’s.
Hadžihalilović’s direction remains delicate but exacting. Her command of visual rhythm keeps the film mesmerizing even when the story stands nearly still.
Each reflection, each glance through glass, underscores her thematic obsession: the act of seeing as both discovery and danger. The narrative’s refusal to resolve mirrors the permanence of uncertainty in both youth and art.
What makes The Ice Tower memorable is not its mystery but its invitation to self-confrontation. Every viewer must decide whether Jeanne has found freedom or simply another form of enclosure. Perhaps both. Like a mirror clouded by frost, her image remains blurred, but for an instant, it flickers with truth.
When Tobe Hooper’s Salem’s Lot first aired as a two-part miniseries in 1979, it terrified audiences with its slow, unnerving atmosphere and deep moral questions. Now restored in glorious 4K, the film finds new resonance in an age where small towns across America seem trapped between memory and decay.
The eerie fictional town of Jerusalem’s Lot, frozen in time, feels uncannily modern, as if its gloom has spread beyond fiction.
Based on Stephen King’s second novel, Salem’s Lot follows Ben Mears, a writer returning to his childhood home in Maine to confront personal ghosts and begin a new project about the local haunted estate, the Marsten House.
Played by David Soul, Ben arrives expecting inspiration but instead enters a nightmare rooted in something older and far darker than his trauma. The mansion’s new owner, Mr. Straker, an aristocratic outsider with too much mystery and too little warmth, becomes the key to a rising wave of terror.
When people begin disappearing and returning pale and hollow-eyed, Ben and a handful of townsfolk must question not only what stalks their neighbors but also whether their own ignorance helped it grow.
The new 4K restoration showcased at Beyond Fest reveals stunning detail and texture that amplify Hooper’s haunting imagery, the blue-tinted fog, the glimmer of candlelight on coffins, and the black windows of the Marsten House that seem to stare back.
These improvements don’t just beautify the film. They make its central metaphor feel even sharper: decay can be dressed in nostalgia but not hidden from sight.
Hooper and King: Masters of Small-Town Horror
Stephen King often builds his nightmares from the familiar. His fictional Maine houses secrets behind white fences and church steeples. In Salem’s Lot, that idea found one of its most potent early forms. The town is small, tight-knit, and proud of its traditions until those very comforts become blindfolds.
Tobe Hooper, fresh from redefining horror with The Texas Chainsaw Massacre, understood this instinctively. His direction lingers over peeling wallpaper, quiet porches, and derelict storefronts long before fangs ever appear. The town feels sick before the first bite.
Together, King and Hooper created a horror story that goes beyond supernatural motives. Vampirism becomes a symptom, not the disease. The real sickness lies in the repression, greed, and moral fatigue that have hollowed out the residents long before the vampire’s arrival.
King’s characters gossip, cheat, and betray each other while pretending politeness. Hooper films them with melancholy calm, as if waiting for their souls to drain naturally.
One of Salem’s Lot’s most striking scenes comes when Ben Mears discusses the nature of evil with his former teacher, Jason. Ben asks if a place can be inherently evil, invoking the cursed Marsten House.
Jason responds with a question that hits harder than any supernatural revelation: Why does that house attract you, then? The exchange crystallizes the film’s theme that evil is not confined to haunted buildings or monsters but may stem from the human need to dance with our fears.
This psychological depth is what separates Salem’s Lot from lesser horror fare. While the vampires are memorably frightening, the real terror lies in reflection.
Ben’s creative fixation parallels the way townsfolk cling to routine even as corruption spreads. The biggest threat to Salem’s Lot isn’t Mr. Straker or his undead master; it’s the comfort of denial.
A Rebirth That Feels Terrifyingly Timely
Viewed today, Salem’s Lot feels more like prophecy than a period piece. The restoration’s clean visuals make the fictional Maine town resemble countless real American suburbs still clinging to mid-century nostalgia. In 2025, the contrast between then and now feels almost symbolic.
Once-proud communities across the country are dwindling, haunted by the loss of small businesses, vanishing youth populations, and eroding civic trust. Hooper’s movie, conceived over four decades ago, translates that fear into supernatural language.
Salem’s Lot 4K (Credit: HBO Max)
King and Hooper use outsiders to expose a community’s weaknesses. Mr. Straker’s refined manners and foreign accent trigger suspicion, yet those prejudices keep the townspeople distracted while genuine corruption spreads within. The parallels to modern fears of outsiders, whether immigrants or cultural change, are hard to miss.
Hooper’s camera turns that unease back on the audience: perhaps the real intruder is the one who refuses to look beyond his own comfort.
A sequence featuring the missing Glick boys carries even more emotional weight today. Mark, the surviving friend and a young horror enthusiast, recognizes the truth faster than any adult. His imagination becomes his shield, his understanding of monsters literal and social.
This theme of generational awareness, youth seeing what adults refuse to admit, echoes through today’s conversations about environment, technology, and community breakdown.
Hooper’s visual language amplifies these meanings. The fog that rolls into town feels machine-made, a cloud of denial. Half-empty church pews and boarded homes hint that faith and industry have crumbled.
Even small details, like flickering neon in the local diner, symbolize how hope struggles to stay lit. The Marsten House looms above it all like a monument to forgotten sins.
Why Salem’s Lot Still Matters
The brilliance of Salem’s Lot lies in its patience. Hooper doesn’t rush to reveal his monsters; instead, he builds dread from quiet observation. The vampires could remain unseen, and the tension would still work.
When they finally emerge pale, feral, and strangely sorrowful, the effect is devastating precisely because the audience has already sensed decay in everyone else.
This structure also reinforces King’s recurring question: Can evil truly be destroyed, or only displaced? When Ben Mears and Mark finally leave the burning town, it’s clear their victory is incomplete.
The vampires may perish, but the moral infection that allowed them entry remains. That ambiguity makes the story timeless, grounding its supernatural events in genuine emotional truth.
Today’s 4K rerelease does more than restore a classic; it reframes it. Watching Salem’s Lot in today’s cultural moment feels like confronting a lingering ghost of our past optimism.
The small-town ideal once symbolized unity and innocence, but Hooper and King show that underneath the nostalgia lurks hunger, both literal and metaphorical. It’s a hunger for belonging, for control, for purity, that too easily curdles into destruction.
Every flicker of that restored footage reminds viewers that the past is neither dead nor gone; it’s undead, feeding on memory until it turns hollow. Salem’s Lot endures because its fear is not about monsters at the door but what we choose to ignore once they’re inside.
