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.
Once you have seen it
Track exactly where the film-within-the-film starts and ends. (structure)
Footage from the Snow Queen production, its rehearsals, and Jeanne's own perceptions are intercut so closely that you eventually cannot tell which order of reality you are watching.
Payoff: The uncertainty is not a puzzle to solve. It is the film's whole argument about being pulled into an image. In the reading: hyalosign. Deleuze calls this a crystal-image, where the actual and its own reflection fuse until you cannot say which one came first.
Watch for a mirror or pane of glass in key scenes. (staging)
Reflective surfaces, glass, ice, screens, the actress's own composed face, keep recurring across the film as a running motif of doubling.
Payoff: Once you track the reflections, the film's world starts to feel sealed, with no clear outside to escape to. In the reading: saturated crystal. Deleuze calls a mirror-saturated world with no outside a perfected crystal, and the doubled surfaces here build exactly that kind of sealed space.
Watch Jeanne grow stiller as the film goes on. (performance)
As the story progresses she moves and speaks less, while the machinery of the production, smoke, mirrors, light, does more and more of the moving around her.
Payoff: By the end the world is doing the moving and Jeanne is simply being held by it.
Carry this in: Try to find the exact frame where the film-within becomes the film. You won't be able to.