Marion Cotillard Plays the Chilly Snow Queen

A film set is no place for little girls. In the fairytale-adjacent world of Lucile Hadžihalilović’s frigid dark fantasy “The Ice Tower,” an orphan runs away from her foster home and takes refuge in the basement of a movie studio, finding herself drawn to the production — and its star, played by Marion Cotillard — the way a child in a Hans Christen Anderson story might be lured into the clutches of a wicked enchantress. Aptly enough, the script they’re shooting is “The Snow Queen,” aspects of which echo through the movie’s many layers, all the way out to us, whom Hadžihalilović hopes to trap in her crystal prism.

Cotillard and Hadžihalilović collaborated once before, early in both their careers, on 2004’s “Innocence,” where the director first planted the unholy seeds she’s still harvesting all these years later: unsettling yet artful projects in which Hadžihalilović depicts the socialization of children according to macabre rituals only their elders seem to understand. In “Evolution,” she showed boys groomed to bear children, while in “Earwig,” a sinister guardian installed a set of frozen dentures in a girl’s mouth, at the express instruction of a faraway sponsor.

At once dazzling and dull, “The Ice Tower” breaks from this pattern in that we meet young Jeanne (Clara Pacini) the day before she manages to escape her foster home, after which, it’ll be her decision how she chooses to exercise her freedom. Until now, she’s been confined to an overcrowded cabin somewhere high in the Alps, cut off from the big city and practically all impact of pop culture. Celebrity can be as alluring as royalty to someone who grew up eating gruel in the hinterlands, though such concepts must be imparted somehow.

Jeanne knows “The Snow Queen” by heart, but has she ever seen a movie in her life? Is she starstruck when she comes face to face with Cristina Van Der Berg (whom Cotillard plays as an austere…