Where to begin with Lucile Hadžihalilović

 “A film evokes what cannot be said with words, things of the unconscious. Cinema is connected to dreams.” This Lucile Hadžihalilović quote comes from an interview with her longtime partner and frequent collaborator, director Gaspar Noé, earlier this year. It touches on some of the challenges in writing about her slim, yet hypnotically strange, body of work.

An avowed admirer of surrealist figureheads such as Italian painter Giorgio de Chirico and female Czech artist Toyen, Hadžihalilović is remarkably consistent in rendering dark, oneiric fables. Her young protagonists, from small children to older adolescents, are typically subject to allusive, allegorical worlds ruled by shadowy adults with clandestine rules that seek to shape or entrap them. But these are sensual explorations rather than overt political indictments. One can leave a film by this French-Bosnian director and discover, even if its narrative mysteries remain intact, the film itself hasn’t left you. Indeed, it’s only just begun to unfold from within. Articulating how, however, is a whole other story.  

In reality, young girls do attend bucolic, even remote, boarding schools – but none arrive in coffins. That’s the striking opening visual conceit to Hadžihalilović’s debut feature, adapting Mine-Haha, or On the Bodily Education of Young Girls, a 1903 novella by Frank Wedekind, the German author of the controversial play Spring Awakening. In Innocence (2004), our new entrant, tellingly named Iris, finds herself without explanation in an institution isolated from the outside world. Iris and her schoolmates, dressed in matching white uniforms, ages colour-coded by hair ribbons, learn about nature and biology, and perform dance routines. But who are the shadowy grown-ups assessing, perhaps even grooming, their development? And why do their two seemingly sympathetic female teachers (Hélène de Fougerolles, Marion Cotillard) advise them that “obedience is the only path to happiness”?

Hadžihalilović deftly employs fixed frames – tellingly, we rarely see the sky when the girls are outside – and disquieting soundscapes to subtly evoke an atmosphere of claustrophobic menace. The film is fecund with symbolism (butterflies, water), flirting with unsettling voyeurism and fetishised desire (though, again, whose desires?). There’s a twisted kinship to Angela Carter’s magic realist fiction, or even – albeit in a less shockingly violent way – to Catherine Breillat’s À ma soeur! (2001), sharing an unnerving, wholly unsentimental view on young girls grappling with their (sexual) identity in a predatory world. All in all, Innocence is a beautifully controlled, hauntingly ambiguous fairytale and one of the best, if often unsung, films of the 2000s.

There may be more than a decade between them, but it’s easy to view Evolution (2015) as Innocence’s gender-flipped mutant twin. Instead of an all-girls school in the forest, here we’re among a group of young boys in a coastal retreat, tended to by young women who care for them with drops of inky black ‘medicine’ before more intensive, invasive medical procedures may be inflicted upon them. Given the breathtaking underwater photography – the film starts with shots worthy of a luminous natural history film – and the frequent undersea rituals involved in these boys’ conditioning, water imagery plays an even greater role here. So too do hints of a more full-on ‘body horror’ approach, almost more grotesque for its relative restraint and the implied reshaping of pre-pubescent flesh (bright orange starfishes attached where they clearly don’t belong).

Evolution may be an original story from Hadžihalilović (and co-writers Alanté Kavaïté and her regular script collaborator Geoff Cox), but her latest film, The Ice Tower (2025), finds her again taking inspiration from established literary sources. Hans Christian Andersen’s 1844 The Snow Queen is adapted into the film-within-a-film on to whose studio set stumbles fostered teen Jeanne (Clara Pacini). Already obsessed with the Andersen story, and gradually becoming more involved with the movie, does Jeanne see the titular star, imperious diva Cristina Van Der Berg (Cotillard again, now herself an international movie star, reuniting with her Innocence director), as potential surrogate mother or perhaps someone whose throne can be taken?

Cristina’s own icy fascination and personal parallels with Jeanne set the pair’s dangerous mutual attraction on a collision course. Yet once again, Hadžihalilović eschews conventional narrative, instead weaving together hallucinatory visuals and discordant aural tapestries for a more unsettling look at a young woman seeking to transform her own fractured identity. And where the younger actors in her films seem to be cast for their unaffected, almost blank performances, Pacini imbues her character with roiling emotion and agency.

B. Catling’s 2019 novella Earwig, featuring a cloistered young girl cared for but controlled by a taciturn adult, and given false teeth made from ice, feels like it was written for Hadžihalilović to adapt into a film. She duly did in 2021, and while the film shares many of her stylistic predilections – atonal ambient sound, abstract imagery – the shift in focus to the girl’s middle-aged male guardian Albert (Paul Hilton) sets it apart from the rest of her work. It’s by no means a lesser feat of dream logic filmmaking, but the perspective of Albert’s repressed memories and fantasies, the slippery chronology and shifting locations, rather than one hermetically sealed environment, make it more challenging to get to grips with.

Given all these beautifully designed, somewhat otherworldly backdrops, it’s bracing to go back to the director’s first mid-length film, La Bouche de Jean-Pierre (sometimes also known as Mimi after its 10-year-old central character) from 1996, and see its opening title card baldly stating the setting as “La France, Aujourd’hui” (“France, Today”). Much more social realist in tone and texture, it casts Mimi into a bleak existence with a suicidal mother and skin-crawling encounters with her caregiving aunt’s creepy paedophile fiancé. Co-created with Noé, it’s reminiscent of his confrontational efforts while clearly establishing Hadžihalilović’s own fascinations. 

Similarly, her later shorts, including Nectar (2014) and De Natura (2018), continue her exploration of women and children in natural surroundings with an eye, and ear, for the unnatural and inexplicable. All told, these films make for one of the most distinctive, enchantingly sinister bodies of work in modern film: each Lucile Hadžihalilović film emerging as utterly enigmatic and entirely cinematic.

The Ice Tower is in cinemas in the UK and Ireland from 21 November.