Everything is covered. Not just the landscape: time, bodies, and intentions are, too. The snow falls with an ancient patience, as if trying to preserve something—or hide it forever. In The Girl in the Snow, Louise Hémon invites us to cross that persistent white veil that blankets a remote corner of the French Alps. There, at the end of the 19th century, the world seems to have paused on the edge of a new century, while the cold keeps everything that seeks to move forward at bay. The snow doesn’t just fall: it decides.
Aimée Lazare, the young teacher who arrives in the village with the task of educating the children, embodies that promise of the future. She represents someone who believes in progress, in the power of knowledge, in the transformative capacity of ideas. Yet her gestures—no matter how small, like bathing the students or reading aloud philosophical passages—are perceived as acts of provocation. Here, cleanliness is a sin, and written words, a danger.
What begins as a portrait of cultural and social tensions soon turns into something else. There are no open confrontations or grand speeches. What emerges is a silent resistance, an emotional fog that gradually envelops Aimée, turning her stay into a kind of imprisonment. She, who arrives convinced she can teach, must learn to survive in an environment that responds with passive hostility, where her mere existence disturbs an ancestral equilibrium. One of Hémon’s greatest strengths is maintaining the right distance from her characters. There are no clear condemnations or redemptions. The village is not simply a place of ignorance, just as Aimée is not a flawless heroine. She, too, carries her own preconceptions, a will that at times becomes arrogance, a need to assert herself that makes her vulnerable. And yet, it’s impossible not to empathize with her loneliness, her desire to connect, with those brief moments in which she believes she might belong—before reality closes in on her again like the snow.
The film unfolds with the pace of a storm slowly gathering, without noise. Small everyday scenes—a shared meal, a walk through the snow, a tense exchange of glances—build a muted tension, as if something terrible were about to happen, though we never quite know what. The threat doesn’t come from a specific event, but from an atmosphere, from a way of life that does not tolerate difference. In this context, the landscape becomes another character. The snow, omnipresent, feels like an open grave: beautiful and dangerous, it covers bodies and memories alike. Everything can be buried here, but nothing disappears. What Aimée represents—a woman alone, free, educated—cannot take root in that frozen soil. Not because she doesn’t try, but because the soil simply won’t allow it.
