Sightlines · how to watch
How to watch The Ice Tower
2025 · Lucile Hadžihalilović · The Ice Tower on Sightlines
4 things to watch and listen for on a first viewing, without spoilers, and 3 more once you have seen it. Each names something you can see or hear, the pattern it belongs to, and what noticing it gives you. How these keys work.
On a first viewing
Watch for the shift between warm, grimy light and cold blue-white light. (light)
Ricquebourg lights Jeanne's ordinary world in warm, worn tones and the Snow Queen set in a sterile blue-white glow, so the two worlds are visually opposed every time the film cuts between them.
Payoff: The color alone tells you which pull, life or the frozen image, has the upper hand in a given scene.
Notice how long a shot holds before the film cuts away. (cutting)
Hadžihalilović withholds cuts well past the point conventional pacing would require, letting a shot of Jeanne watching run on until the watching itself becomes the point.
Payoff: The film asks you to sit in duration the same way Jeanne sits in fascination.
Listen for ambient hum and breath instead of music. (sound)
The film leans on studio noise, wind, and breathing rather than a conventional score, using music only sparingly and pointedly across the whole runtime.
Payoff: The near absence of music keeps you suspended in atmosphere rather than cued toward a particular feeling.
Watch Jeanne's face for how little it gives away. (performance)
Pacini plays her mostly through gaze and posture, watchful and nearly silent, while Cotillard's Cristina stays composed behind a controlled, masklike glamour of her own.
Payoff: Neither performer lets you read her, so you end up fascinated the same way Jeanne is. In the reading: icon of quality. Deleuze calls a face fixed on one sustained quality a qualisign, and Cotillard holds hers, cold and controlled, for almost the whole film.
The 3 rewatch keys open on this page when you choose "Seen it?".
Carry this in: Try to find the exact frame where the film-within becomes the film. You won't be able to.