Marion Cotillard in The Ice Tower, the latest feature film from Lucile Hadzihalilovic.TIFF
French filmmaker Lucile Hadzihalilovic has garnered critical acclaim but flown under the radar for years. This month’s retrospective of her works – about the brutal growing pains of adolescence – aims to fix that.
Growing Pains: Lucile Hadzihalilovic’s New Worlds will screen the filmmaker’s five features to date at the TIFF Lightbox, including her most recent release The Ice Tower (2025), as well as two shorts: De Natura (2018) and Nectar (2014). Curated by guest programmer Saffron Maeve, whose master’s degree focused on Hadzihalilovic, the series is an opportunity to see her challenging films in context.
The Ice Tower is the latest in a body of work that perennially returns to the topic of adolescence while subverting the sentimental narratives that commonly define it onscreen. The film follows teenager Jeanne (Clara Pacini), who runs away from her foster home, trekking through the frosty Alps in search of an idyllic skating rink in a town square that matches a folded photo in her pocket.
When she arrives, none of the other skaters want to socialize with her. Without a place to sleep for the night, Jeanne squats in a dark warehouse. The light of morning reveals the space is a film set, an in-progress shoot for an adaptation of Hans Christian Andersen’s The Snow Queen starring the ethereal and severe Cristina (Marion Cotillard). As Jeanne squeezes her way onto the production as an extra, Cristina’s cryptic fascination with her becomes increasingly intense.
In Hadzihalilovic’s 2015 film Evolution, a boy discovers a dead body with a starfish attached to it.TIFF
Hadzihalilovic’s nearly abstract films are notable for depicting childhood as lonely, alienating and dangerous. Her breakout feature Innocence (2004) – an adaptation of an early 20th-century Frank Wedekind novella, also starring Cotillard – was set at a boarding school for girls where new students arrive in coffins.
In Evolution (2015), while swimming, a boy discovers a dead, naked body not unlike his with a starfish attached, a sighting his mother vehemently tells him he didn’t see. Earwig (2021) begins with the nightly caretaking (using a dental contraption that looks like something out of a Saw film) of a young girl whose teeth are made of ice.
Although they share the oppressive alternative realities of dystopias and the atmospheric dread of horror, Hadzihalilovic’s films are allergic to easy genre categorization. Rather than linear chronicles in which children arc toward moments of self-articulation and discovery, Hadzihalilovic favours dream-like, sometimes baffling story structures that lock her characters in ambiguity. Glacial scenes with very little dialogue float alongside each other, connected by feelings or ideas rather than substantial plot tissue.
A still from Earwig, 2021.TIFF
The visuals of each film are also often distinctly isolating – defined by harsh angles, murky lighting or aggressive contrasts – placing viewers at a distance from onscreen events and evoking the feeling they’re seeing something they shouldn’t.
The compositions of Earwig are inspired by the turned faces, lonely subjects and empty interiors painted by Vilhelm Hammershoi. Evolution extracts an oppressive brightness from its Canary Island setting, capturing rocky beaches with extraterrestrial unfamiliarity. In the closed-off isolation of the school in Innocence, even hair ribbons – a cartoonishly recognizable symbol of French girlhood – become eerie. It’s Sigmund Freud’s uncanny in action.
Hadzihalilovic’s depiction of children is refreshing and complex. Compared to their typical function as generic symbols of rose-tinted innocence or, in horror movies, its inversion, Hadzihalilovic crafts child characters who are strange and unknowable.
Parents and guardians are also represented atypically, running the gamut from indifference to repulsion and cruelty toward their charges. These are not the protective adults frequently featured in coming-of-age cinema but figures who are untrustworthy at best.
Hadzihalilovic’s films are uncomfortable to watch, sometimes because of their transgressive rendering of the relationship between adults and children, but mostly because there is little else like them. Her work is often lumped in with the French New Extremity, a post-1990s trend of filmmakers using graphic violence that includes the work of her partner and frequent collaborator Gaspar Noé, as well as Catherine Breillat, Claire Denis, Bruno Dumont and others. More recently, Julia Ducournau’s Titane and Coralie Fargeat’s The Substance have brought this type of filmmaking to wider audiences.
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While New Extremity films are marked by grotesque excess, Hadzihalilovic is a profoundly withholding filmmaker. Her “less is more” approach is effective: a bloody mouth, a hard stare, a space that seems to lead nowhere or an endless pause in an empty room can produce more disquieting results than a ton of action. These are not laptop movies – their shadowy spaces become all the more immersive on the big screen.
Hadzihalilovic’s unrecognizable dream worlds may feel far from present-day adolescence. Still, they glimpse some hard truths. Young people are growing up during surreal and unprecedented times.
At the end of The Ice Tower, Jeanne contemplates a prismatic piece of glass that refracts multiple worlds and realms: some bleakly governed by bad actors, others teeming with freedom and possibility. To encounter Hadzihalilovic’s work is the experience of facing and feeling both realities at once.
Growing Pains: Lucile Hadzihalilovic’s New Worlds runs at the TIFF Lightbox Nov. 7 through 23.
Editor’s note: A previous version of this article incorrectly stated La premier mort de Nono (1987) was part of the retrospective. This article has been updated to include De Natura (2018) among the retrospective's films.