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Is-Slottet Reviews

1988
1 hr 16 mins
Drama
NR

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In this somber tragedy, a young woman moves to a small town to live with her aunt after her unmarried mother dies. There she makes a new friend. One day, she makes some shy sexual advances to her new friend. This confuses them, and she begins to cry and beg her friend not to tell. On the following day, the girl pauses beside an enchantingly beautiful frozen waterfall. To her it is an "ice palace." She enters the shining castle and begins to wander through it's beautiful crystalline chambers. Unfortunately she becomes hopelessly lost. The ice then begins to melt, and though she makes a valiant effort to make it through the icy water to the entrance, she fails and perishes from cold and exhaustion. Her friend's name is the final word uttered from her freezing lips. The next day, a search party begins looking for her after she is again absent from school, but her body is never found. Meanwhile her friend begins to slowly withdraw from those around her.

After the death of her unmarried mother, Unn moves to a small town to live with her aunt and becomes friends with Siss. Unn makes some tentative sexual advances to Siss, then begins crying, begging Siss to keep her "secret." The next day on her way to school, Unn stops at a frozen waterfall that has become an "ice palace," but as she wanders through room after room of glistening beauty, she loses her way, and the ice begins to melt. After trudging bravely through the icy water, she finally succumbs to exhaustion and the cold, collapsing in a heap and calling out for Siss with her dying breath. When Unn doesn't show up at school, a search party looks for her, but does not find her body, and Siss becomes slowly more withdrawn as she tries to deal with her feelings for her now dead friend. Unmistakably Scandinavian in tenor, unremittingly somber in tone, THE ICE PALACE makes "The Little Match Girl" look like Pippi Longstocking. It is difficult to imagine a more evocative symbol of alienation and isolation than the beautiful ice cavern that intrigues and finally imprisons Unn. Despite the earnest performances by its young leads and the thematic consistency of its ice palace visuals, however, the deeper insights one craves from Blom's film either don't exist or are buried beneath its often-impenetrable surface. (In Norwegian; English subtitles.)