The Worlds of Lucile Hadžihalilović, Collected at Last

Four films, one box, two North American Blu-ray premieres. I got twenty minutes with the director, and she spent most of it politely dismantling the questions I thought were clever.

“You can make a film about something very dark, but the act of making a film is optimistic, I think, by itself.”

Lucile Hadžihalilović said that to me near the end of our twenty minutes, and I have not been able to put it down since. I had just watched four of her films in a row. Four films about kids who are never told the rules, bodies that rearrange themselves without a permission slip, and soft-spoken adults running schools you do not get to graduate from. Optimistic was not the word I had loaded in the chamber. She meant it though, and by the time we hung up I knew exactly what she meant.

Her movies do a thing where beauty and dread drink from the same cup and neither one looks away. That is the whole engine. It is also why she has been almost impossible to shelve next to anyone else for the last twenty years, and why the new set is worth your attention.

From Yellow Veil Pictures, a new partner label over at Severin Films, comes The Worlds of Lucile Hadžihalilović, a four-disc collection that finally puts every one of her features in the same place. It arrives as part of Severin’s 20th anniversary, and it is up for preorder now on the Severin webstore.

What is in the box

Four films: Innocence, Evolution, Earwig, and The Ice Tower. Two of them, Innocence and Earwig, show up here as North American Blu-ray premieres. If you have spent the last few years hunting down a watchable copy of Innocence through out-of-print discs and shady uploads, that is the line that matters. A clean Region A release of these two has been a long time coming.

Severin says the set carries more than four hours of special features and a new 60-page booklet, with essays from Saffron Maeve, Alison Taylor, and Stephen Thrower. Riding along with Innocence are two of Hadžihalilović’s short films, De Natura and Nectar, each with its own introduction from the director.

I should be upfront about one thing. Four Hadžihalilović films back to back is not a cozy night in. It is gorgeous, and it is a lot like eating an entire cake made of fog. Pace yourself. Maybe invite a friend who likes to be unsettled.

One world, built four times

The films stretch across more than two decades, and watching them in sequence you feel the same handful of obsessions getting picked up, turned over, and set back down in a new room.

Innocence (2004) was her debut, a slow sink into a walled-off girls’ boarding school loosely pulled from Frank Wedekind’s Mine-Haha. Marion Cotillard turns up as one of the teachers. Evolution (2015) swapped the girls for boys and dropped them on a island of strange biology, quiet medical procedures, and changes nobody will explain to them. Earwig (2021) was her first film in English, adapted from Brian Catling’s novel, a hushed story about guardianship and a girl whose teeth are made of ice. And The Ice Tower (2025), freely spun off Hans Christian Andersen’s The Snow Queen, brought Cotillard back roughly twenty years after Innocence and took home the Silver Bear for Outstanding Artistic Contribution at the Berlinale. Clara Pacini, August Diehl, and Gaspar Noé fill out the rest.

I went into our talk convinced childhood was her big subject, and that she keeps building little institutions to trap it in. I said as much. She let me down easy.

“I don’t think it’s childhood as an institution, but it’s childhood being in society, or being trained, or being educated, or being shaped for some purpose in society,” she said. The scary part is not the school. It is what kindness curdles into when it has a job to do. “It’s about how care is also, or how education is also, an oppression,” she told me, and then made a point of saying she has no fix for it. She is not writing a problem with an answer key. She would rather move in next to the problem and stay a while.

The films do shift. She admitted she was “really surprised” how many people called The Ice Tower slow, more than they ever said about the early ones, and she half blames the world for speeding up around her. We watch everything at a sprint now. She would like you to get lost instead.

She is not going to explain it

Most people reach for the word discomfort with her films. I reached for it too. She handed it right back.

“Well, in fact, I don’t think so much about discomfort,” she said. What she chases is closer to seduction. She wants you living inside the movie, not watching it from the cheap seats. “I would like to make them feel like the main characters, like the protagonists,” she told me, describing the viewer she pictures while she works. The dread is just what immersion smells like once the lights go down.

A lot of that immersion is sound, and it is the part of her toolkit nobody puts on the poster. The images get all the praise. The silences do the real damage. She described it as trying “to give this feeling of being inside the head of a character,” treating the soundtrack as the most private layer of the whole film instead of something painted on at the end.

Then there are answers, which she flatly refuses to give you. This is the part that either clicks or makes you check your phone.

“I think it’s exciting for an audience to be lost in a film,” she said. She does not mean it as a dare. She means it as a gift. “I really don’t like, at the end, when you have like the solution or the answer,” she told me, and the rest follows on its own. If she will not close the door for you, the movie is yours to finish. “It’s up to the audience to see what they do with what I had proposed.”

The extras worth your time

The supplements skew toward context over flash, which fits work this quiet. The good stuff is in the conversations. Hadžihalilović sits down with cinematographer Manu Dacosse on Evolution, co-writer Alanté Kavaïté gets her own interview, and the Earwig disc brings in collaborators Geoff Cox and Jonathan Ricquebourg. Actress Zoé Auclair turns up for a piece called “Innocence Explained,” and critic Beatrice Loayza talks through The Ice Tower. Stack two Alexandra Heller-Nicholas video essays and a run of IFC Center Q&As on top, and you have less a making-of than a long walk through how this world keeps getting rebuilt.

The discs, briefly:

• Disc 1, Innocence: director intro, the shorts De Natura and Nectar with intros, “Innocence Explained” by Zoé Auclair, an Alexandra Heller-Nicholas video essay, IFC Center Q&A, trailer.
• Disc 2, Evolution: director intro, a discussion between cinematographer Manu Dacosse and Hadžihalilović, an interview with co-writer Alanté Kavaïté, trailer.
• Disc 3, Earwig: director intro, an interview with Hadžihalilović, interviews with co-writer Geoff Cox and cinematographer Jonathan Ricquebourg, trailer.
• Disc 4, The Ice Tower: director intro, an interview with Jonathan Ricquebourg, an interview with Hadžihalilović by Beatrice Loayza, two IFC Center Q&As, a second Heller-Nicholas video essay, trailer.

Plus that 60-page booklet, all of it Region A.

Why you should care

If you live in body horror, Evolution and the cold cruelty of Earwig speak your dialect without an accent. If you came up on surrealism and arthouse, here is someone who uses dream logic as the frame of the house, not the wallpaper. And if you collect physical media, two North American Blu-ray premieres in one box is not a thing that happens often.

What got me, watching all four close together, is how much they rhyme. Same children. Same locked worlds. The same beauty that will not pinky-swear you are safe. Hadžihalilović keeps walking back toward that despair because it pulls at her, the same way Andersen does. She called his Little Mermaid a beautiful story that is also unbearably sad. And she keeps making the films anyway, because making them is the hopeful act. “You can make a film about something very dark,” she told me, “but the act of making a film is optimistic, I think, by itself.”

Four dark worlds, one box, finally sharing a shelf. The Worlds of Lucile Hadžihalilović is up for preorder now at the Severin webstore. Watch them in order. Do not look for the door.