L’Engloutie (The Girl in the Snow) | 2025 Cannes Film Festival Review

Snow Way: Hémon Delivers Unwanted Help in the High Alps

A young, idealistic school teacher almost literally chooses her hill to die on in Louise Hémon’s feature debut L’Engloutie (The Girl in the Snow), a slow-burning battle of wills between enlightenment and ignorance set in turn-of-the century village Soudain, nestled in the isolated Haute-Alpes region of France. Almost lazily sinister, the drastic juxtapositions between night and day highlight the teacher’s dwindling abilities to shed light into dark hearts and superstitious beliefs, eventually to her own detriment. It has all the essence of a horror narrative and, yet, Hémon keeps an icy, observational distance, as if the film itself is destined to remain in a permanent state of defrost.

On the heels of winter, Aimee Lazare (Galatea Bellugi) blows into an isolated, mountain hamlet, a newly designated primary school teacher who takes her occupation quite seriously. However, she finds herself immediately at odds with the locals, who find her ways suspicious. In an attempt to teach the children how to read and write their own stories by showcasing her own prized notebook, the women seize her writings and burn them, believing it’s evil to lock words between covers. The local men are a minor distraction for Aimee, including Pepin (Samuel Kircher), and a lonely disfigured man, Enoch (Matthieu Lucci). Tragedy strikes when an avalanche hits and it seems the villagers come to view Aimee as a bad omen.

From the moment of Aimee’s arrival (whose name rather ironically suggests she’s a friend these people are hardly interested in having), there’s a prickling sense of doom on her horizon. She stays up late reading Descartes, masturbating quietly to a hand drawn picture in the text. It’s immediately clear her education and political views make her an immediate alien presence. Defined as a republican, which in 1899 was during the time of the French Third Republic, an era of continuous colonization while the Dreyfus Affair was still ongoing and dividing the country politically, Aimee storms into town with the air of Miss Jean Brodie, determined to mould the minds of the village rubes.

Tonally, The Girl in the Snow strikes an odd energy, suggesting it’s going to veer into the despairing hellfire of something like The Devil’s Bath (2024) or maybe the sublime affirmations of Vermiglio (2024). Aimee’s interactions with the children are initially productive, but even her wards eventually descend into a preternatural wariness. Her excessively jubilant announcement of the new century finds her pondering where they’ll all be in the year 2000, seemingly crushed when even the children solemnly declare they’ll all be dead. Including her. Bellugi, who is playing the polar opposite of a similar period turn in Gloria! (2024), nails a haughty, spinster-y governess akin to Deborah Kerr in The Innocents (1961) as the classic Henry James-ian sacrifice destined for madness assigned to a post of artificial power.

Tendrils of sensuality linger between Aimee and Samuel Kircher’s Pepin, who ends up being claimed in an avalanche, not unlike the unlucky chamois they’d recently dug out of its snowy grave. Enoch, who’s portrayed as something of the hunchbacked village idiot abandoned by his biological family for Algeria, clearly has a crush on Aimee, which she perhaps dangerously ignores. As more mishaps are incurred by the village, Aimee comes down with a fever, forced to undergo their pagan medical rituals (which also includes the participation of an unfortunate chicken). An abrupt amelioration of Aimee’s influence arrives like a veritable slap, with the young teacher likely left forever changed. Emile Sornin’s pronounced score suggests The Girl in the Snow is a moral fable, a grim fairy tale about colonial attitudes or pretentious posturing. Either way, perhaps its main takeaway is how the road to hell is paved by one’s own personal ‘good’ intentions.

Reviewed on May 15th at the 2025 Cannes Film Festival (78th edition) – Directors’ Fortnight, Critics’ Week. 98 Mins.

★★★½/☆☆☆☆☆