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Capsules

CAPSULE: THE ICE TOWER (2025)

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La tour de glace

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DIRECTED BY: Lucile Hadzihalilovic

FEATURING: Clara Pacini, , August Diehl, Marine Gesbert, Gaspar Noé

PLOT: Jeanne, a fifteen-year-old orphan, leaves her foster home and comes across a film shoot for a dark fairy tale.

Still from The Ice Tower (2025)

COMMENTS: In the realm of the Ice Queen, the snow is vibrant, ethereal—and menacing. Drifts of crystalline flakes reflect muted light as it swirls aimlessly, falling upon and around the Queen, whose dusky gaze is a terrible, beautiful thing to behold. Jeanne beholds this gaze, and is immediately entranced by the fictional queen, as well as the actress who portrays her. Lucile Hadzihalilovic’s new film is as atmospheric as it is contemplative, unfolding Jeanne’s journey toward womanhood with all the portentous flair that cinema can offer.

If one were feeling glib, The Ice Tower could be described as “art- haunted-house”; but perhaps the film is too serious for that. That’s not to say it isn’t permeated by camera magic, on display for the viewer, and for Jeanne, who serendipitously falls into a film studio (almost literally) as the team there attempts to re-bottle lightning caught in a previous adventure featuring the cold, enigmatic Ice Queen. The Queen is played by Cristina, a cold, enigmatic actor interchangeable with her on-screen persona. As troubled as she is beautiful, Cristina relies on her “doctor” to help her through the her quotidian routine of performance, and curb her ambitions for an unreachable perfection. (This perfection, unattained, is the responsibility of the film-within-the-film director, played with graceful frustration by none other than Gaspar Noé.) While Cristina cannot abide flaws, the director lives in the real world—even if he is a magic-maker of cinema—and is quick to recognize that “good enough” is, by definition, good enough.

The Ice Tower is primarily about the bond between Jeanne and Cristina, the former replacing the actress who was cast as the queen’s protégé. By the finish, after all the narrowly framed widescreen shots, scant illumination, and a hauntingly dangerous venture to a remote cliffside, a fissure splits open; Cristina sought a lover, Jeanne sought a mother, and neither ends up contented. The clash between innocence and despondence worms through the gloomy corridors of Hadzihalilovic’s vision, with bright, minute illuminations crowded on all sides by murk. She has conjured a melancholy view from her dark crystal ball—with the sorcery of cinema forcing its light through the umbra.

The Ice Tower is in theaters now. We’ll let you know when it comes to home video.

WHAT THE CRITICS SAY:

“…a twisted retro fairytale that sits somewhere between Frozen and Mulholland Drive… an Old World children’s tale set in a place that’s both eerily real and utterly weird.”–Jordan Mintzer (festival screening)

Capsules

CAPSULE: WARM WATER UNDER A RED BRIDGE (2001)

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Akai hashi no shita no nurui mizu

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DIRECTED BY: 

FEATURING: , Misa Shimizu, Kazuo Kitamura

PLOT: An unemployed salesman intends to steal hidden treasure from a confectionary shop, but complications arise when he falls for the elderly owner’s caretaker, a woman with a unique condition.

COMMENTS: Sasano is already down on his luck when his only friend, Taro, passes away. The architectural firm he worked for has folded, leaving him unemployed, and his wife only calls to insult him while demanding his unemployment check. Taro, known as the “Philosopher,” lived as a hobo in a tent filled with rare books, but he was the only person to treat Sasano with respect and to offer him advice gleaned over the course of a misspent life.

Taro once told Sasano of a buried treasure, secreted in a pot, in a house with a view of a red bridge, in a summer resort town on the Sea of Japan. At an impromptu funerary meal held in his honor, Sasano mentions Taro’s claim to this improbable treasure. His hobo companions laugh it off; Taro told the rest of them about it, too. But after a series of unpromising job interviews, Sasano decides to leave Tokyo for the seaside, in search of Taro’s supposed pot of gold.

Arriving in the off season, Sasano stands out as an unlikely tourist. He locates the red bridge, and the house, which Taro had worried wouldn’t still be standing. Sasano spies a woman leaving the building and tails her to the grocery store. There, he catches her stealing cheese while awkwardly standing in a puddle of water. A dropped earring gives him an excuse to follow her back home. She hesitantly welcomes him in, then their chance meeting rapidly becomes a rather. . . aqueous sexual encounter.

Saeko, as she reluctantly explains, suffers from too much “water,” and when it overflows, she’s driven to commit crimes like petty theft. Thoroughly shocked by the whole thing, Sasano hypocritically reproaches her for stealing, while the relationship provides him convenient opportunities for him to search the house for Taro’s treasure.

As Sasano spends more time in the town and comes to know its quirky residents, the story heads in a predictable direction; but its tale of two unlikely romances is tinged with metaphysical symbolism surrounding the element of water. In one scene, Saeko takes Sasano to meet a nuclear physicist who studies neutrinos. He explains to them how the particles have to be shot through “superpure water” in order for their experiments to work. The town’s pure water also provides the key ingredient to making the perfect sweet cakes, though as Saeko eventually reveals to Sasano, their river was once dangerously polluted with cadmium.

Director Imamura’s enduring interest in the connection between human beings and their environment, as well as his explorations into the influence of crime and nonconformity on Japanese society, surface here again, in his final film. The flights of philosophical fancy lead into brief moments of CGI-animated imagery, but most of the scenes remain rooted more or less firmly in reality. Ultimately, Warm Water makes for a slightly kinky but heart-warming tale of how to find purpose, meaning, and happiness in life, along with sex without shame.

WHAT THE CRITICS SAY:

“…combines fish out of water stories with a weird metaphor for female sexuality in this sweetly quirky film which never quite gels.”–Laura Clifford, Reeling Reviews

Warm Water Under a Red Bridge [Blu-ray]

Warm Water Under a Red Bridge [Blu-ray]
  • Region A Blu-ray
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List Candidates

APOCRYPHA CANDIDATE: KILL THE JOCKEY (2024)

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El jockey

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Kill the Jockey is currently available for purchase or rental on video-on-demand.

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DIRECTED BY: Luis Ortega

FEATURING: Nahuel Pérez Biscayart, Úrsula Corberó, Daniel Fanego

PLOT: Remo, a gifted and drug-addled jockey, finds himself on the run from the mob after paddock fence smash-up leaves him hospitalized.

Still from Kill the Jockey (2024)

WHY IT MIGHT JOIN THE APOCRYPHA: Even before his traumatic brain injury, Remo is not well in the head, and director Luis Ortega’s narrative reflects that haziness. Once our fractured jockey hits the streets in a borrowed lady’s fur coat (with elegant handbag), all bets are off as Kill the Jockey careens toward its mystical photo-finish.

COMMENTS: The horse is secured in the center of the transport plane, monitored by a serious-faced attendant in an uncertain uniform. The man peers out the window, and observes the craft is approaching the airstrip. The horse’s ears twitch, ever so slightly, as it stands stock-still, darting its eyes left and right. We can tell it is unsettled—highly unsettled—but unsure as to why. Regardless, it makes no sudden moves as it attempts to get a bead on just what is going on, and why it feels so very disturbed.

This beast’s experience traveling through the air resembles the viewer’s journey through Luis Ortega’s metaphysical sports drama, Kill the Jockey; though, unlike the horse, we are treated to regular shots of comedy and a delightful soundtrack. Remo, the titular jockey, drinks (whiskey and ketamine), dances, and seems to be in dangerous pursuit of comatose living. Remo’s boss, Fanego, claims he loves his jockeys like sons, which may well be true, but certainly loves having an infant in his arms as a prop (observed, by one of his goons, as having been apparently the same age for the past seven years). Remo’s lover, Abril, doesn’t seem to love him any more. She tells him so, and in response to how she might come to love him again: “Only if you die and are reborn.” Remo takes on the challenge.

With the second act, cued by a close-up of two radically different-sized pupils on Remo’s post-coma visage, what is and isn’t actually happening becomes increasingly unclear. It appears that Remo, against the odds, survived, and also that he’s in for a personality change of foundational proportions. But why does he no longer affect a measuring scale? (His gun, apparently, weighs one kilogram; that’s around one more kilogram than he registers.)  When did he learn to apply face make-up so capably? And just how did Fanego’s Hispanic-white-boy baby suddenly become a black one? (I didn’t quite believe his claim that “…just happens as they grow.”)

The one certainty afforded us is that our hero, and his story, has come unblinkered. Remo becomes Dolores, Dolores charms her prison mates (and the warden) before dawning a jockey uniform for some underground competition. Abril falls in love again, anticipating the birth of Remo’s daughter. Then a blast of violence catalyzes a metaphysical transference, leaving Abril and Remo—and us—with a happy ending that goes down as gaily as a ketamine and whiskey cocktail.

WHAT THE CRITICS SAY:

“A colorful Argentine oddity…  Luis Ortega’s alternately dark and daffy eighth feature is suitably untethered for a story concerned with the malleability of the self. That comes at some cost to its impact, however: Awash with kooky gags and bolstered by the strange, soulful presence of leading man Nahuel Pérez Biscayart, it’s fun but flighty, liable to throw some viewers from the saddle.”–Guy Lodge, Variety (contemporaneous)

List Candidates

APOCRYPHA CANDIDATE: SANATORIUM UNDER THE SIGN OF THE HOURGLASS (2024)

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“Perhaps we were misled by skillful advertising when we decided to send Father here. Time put back – it sounded good, but what does it come to in reality?”–Bruno Schulz, Sanatorium pod Klepsydra, 1937

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DIRECTED BY: ,

FEATURING: Tadeusz Janiszewski, Wioletta Kopanska, Allison Bell

PLOT: An auctioneer witnesses the activation of a sepulchrum for a deceased retina while Jozef visits his dead/dying father in the titular sanatorium.

Still from Sanatorium Under the Sign of the Hourglass (2024)

WHY IT MIGHT MAKE THE APOCRYPHA: A film adaptation of the titular surreal short story by Bruno Schulz already earned a place on the List. Is another deserving? This version boasts the -esque animation stylings for which the Quay Brothers are rightfully renowned (with the technique utilized more heavily than in their Certified Weird feature Institute Benjamenta). ‘ Hourglass Sanatorium exploited the dream logic of the story, with events frenetically shifting from scene to scene. The Quays, in contrast, excavate the idea of time held back for an unspecified interval, its “limbos and afterbreezes,”i creating a somnolent Sanatorium of vague and enigmatic impressions.

COMMENTS: Like many films by the Brothers Quay, Sanatorium is difficult to summarize. A seven part structure forms less a coherent story than a series of tableaux nested within each other. The perspective shifts among dutiful son Jozef, an auctioneer, and a mysterious female patient, J. Jozef’s visit to his father, at the sanatorium where the dead still live because time is arrested, serves as a frame narrative within a frame narrative, within which isolated occurrences taken from a selection of Schulz’s collected writings appear.

We first meet an auctioneer on a rooftop, beneath a sky of swirling clouds, soliciting bids for unusual and impossible items like the thirteenth month and exotic birds’ eggs (recalling Father’s ill-fated menagerie in Schulz’s story “Birds”). His audience consists of only two chimney sweeps, and when neither makes a bid, he lets them to get back to work.

In the house below, a maid prepares for the auctioneer’s arrival. As he enters the room, she removes the dust cloth from an object perched on a table : a pyramidal box with oculus windows in its sides and a little drawer which opens to display the glassy retina of an eye. The auctioneer explains the mystery of this rare sepulchrum—at a propitious moment the eye will liquify and shed seven tears, and the preserved sights contained within will become Jozef’s dreams as he succumbs to the sanatorium’s will to sleep.

The auctioneer’s frame is live-action, filmed in the gauzy black and white style of Institute Benjamenta, as is J.’s (and a few scenes where an actor, and not a puppet, portrays Jozef). When the scene cuts to Jozef’s ominous train trip (he’s uncertain whether or not his father lives, and this uncertainty will persist), we enter the Quays’ puppet theater. Their minutely detailed miniature sets, to use Schulz’s words, “exude an air of strange and frightening neglect.” The sanatorium setting, its vaguely nineteenth century atmosphere with faintly Continue reading APOCRYPHA CANDIDATE: SANATORIUM UNDER THE SIGN OF THE HOURGLASS (2024) →

Capsules

CAPSULE: GWEN AND THE BOOK OF SAND (1985)

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Gwen Et Le Livre De Sable

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DIRECTED BY:

FEATURING: Voices of Michel Robin, Lorella DiCicco, Armand Babel, Raymond Jourdan, Jacques Ruisseau

PLOT: Sometime “After the gods have left…”, what remains is a desert landscape in which a few animals and nomads make their home; the only danger being the Makou, something that drops objects of various size onto the desert floor, forcing the nomads to live underground. Gwen, an orphan, falls in love with a strange boy, Nokmoon, who is taken away one night by the Makou. She and Roseline (a 173 year old woman) set off on a journey to retrieve him; in doing so, they encounter a mysterious cult.

Still from gwen and the book of sand (1985)

COMMENTS: The post-apocalyptic tale is a genre of its own, but when you take post-apocalypse and desert and put them together, you get The Road Warrior. It’s practically the template followed by its own sequels and countless homages/ripoffs. And when it comes to non-apocalyptic sci-fi/fantasy, the template is Dune. These stories are usually heavily plot-driven, with a relentless forward momentum.

Gwen is desert post-apocalypse in a poetic mode. The title might make one surmise that the title character will undergo a series of adventures and challenges for the next hour or so, but it’s not so. The movie is gentler than that. It’s paced leisurely; there is a plot, but it drives lightly. Instead, the film focuses on visuals: characters walking across the sands on stilts, landscapes littered with objects such as oversized utensils and eyeglasses, close-ups of the pincipals. And it’s all the more striking for being animated with a gouache paint palette, which softens things, giving the impression of a dream. (One visual reference that I twigged was Henri Rousseau’s “The Sleeping Gypsy.”)

Gwen is about mood and atmosphere: the surreality of the landscape, how the nomads live in this world, how they hunt, how they travel. There’s little explanation of how this desert came to exist, other than the oblique “the gods have left,” or of the Makou. And that’s to the film’s advantage, especially as things get more surreal and the introduction of the Makou Cult (which includes pointed satire of religion). Although there are what could be referred to as “antagonists,” there’s no outright villain, as there would be in a more standard treatment. The music of Pierre Alrand, a longtime collaborator of Laguione’s, adds to the moody atmosphere.

Fantastic Planet, another French animation with a similar mood and adult approach, is Gwen‘s closest relative. Planet, however, is much more brutal in approach. Gwen is made for adults, but it’s family-friendly—although it’s probably way too slow and not antic enough for young children (although the visuals may attract them). Older kids could get more out of it, though again it’s paced much slower than current animated films. Fans of , and especially of Nausicaa of the Valley of the Wind, might also get into the film’s rhythm and mood.

Gwen‘s first ever U.S. release on 4K and Blu-ray comes from Deaf Crocodile, in a limited or standard edition. The movie has a commentary by Samm Deighan, along with an interview with director Laguionie by Dennis Bartok and an intriguing video essay by Dr. Will Dodson and Ryan Verrill. The Limited Edition includes a 60 page booklet with essays by Laguionie, film historian Jennifer Barker, and critic/DC house writer Walter Chaw, as well as a slipcase with new art by Beth Morris.

(This movie was noimated for review by Russa03, who said it was “a surrealist, post-apocalypse animation and it’s beautiful to boot.” Suggest a weird movie of your own here.)

Gwen And The Book Of Sand (4k UHD + Blu-ray)

Gwen And The Book Of Sand (4k UHD + Blu-ray)
  • A teenage girl and her 173 year old companion take an epic journey in French director Jean-François Laguionie's hauntingly poetic animated classic.
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