Coline Morel, an unconventional explorer and lover of the Great North, suddenly returns to her hometown in the Jura Mountains after years of absence. In this place, now foreign to her, she tries to reconnect with her brothers Basile and Lolo, and with Christophe, her first love. However, her return triggers a series of surreal events: her eccentric personality and unstable mental state make her a disruptive force within the community, and her actions, ranging from comic to tragic, end up destabilizing everyone around her.

As she attempts to find meaning in her present life, Coline becomes increasingly immersed in an enigmatic silence. Her goal is to write a treatise on the end of the world and the collapse of the ecosystem, a work that becomes a metaphor for her own inner dissolution. Finally, she disappears without a trace, only to be found in Greenland, unconscious and presumed dead. But Coline wakes up and, aware of her irreversible condition, chooses to embark on her final journey among the glaciers, embracing her end as an act of extreme freedom.

The Incredible Snow Woman is not just a portrait of an unconventional woman, but a visual treatise on the fragility of existence, radical loneliness, and the impossibility of belonging to a place, a community, or even to oneself. Coline Morel, the wandering and dissonant protagonist, moves between the Jura and Greenland, but her journey is not geographic: it is an inner exploration, a return to her roots that turns out to be a farewell.

Coline is the symptom of a disintegrating time: her desire to write about the end of the world overlaps with her own psychological and physical decomposition, making her not only an observer but the very body of a planetary agony. Her confusion in human relationships—love that cannot be rebuilt, a brother who watches her with concern, a community that rejects her—is the microcosmic translation of the rupture between man and nature.

Her lesson on the ecosystem to a class of children too young to understand becomes a grotesque parable of incommunicability: knowledge, experience, anxiety—everything becomes incomprehensible to those who are not ready, to those who have not lived through the fracture. This moment is one of many scenes where the film combines irony and tragedy, advancing a poetics of the absurd that recalls Beckett’s theater: the world is not ready for those who see beyond, and those who see beyond are condemned to eternal exile.

In the second act, Greenland is no longer just a physical place, but a liminal dimension, the realm of absolute white where Coline dissolves. Here, her desire to die becomes almost a shamanic ritual, a passage that evokes myths of voluntary abandonment to nature as the final act of reconciliation with the universe. The scene of the interrupted funeral, where death itself merges with life, is the supreme symbol of a protagonist who never finds a definitive boundary between being and non-being.

The director creates a film that rejects traditional narrative structures to embrace the disordered flow of Coline’s consciousness. The direction swings between hyperrealism and the grotesque, intimacy and epic, creating a work that recalls Herzog’s existential narratives and the raw humor of Kaurismäki’s cinema. Blanche Gardin embodies this precariousness with a performance that challenges every convention: she does not seek the audience’s sympathy, she does not want to be understood, she simply allows herself to be traversed by the film like a foreign body, an object impossible to classify.

In the end, the final image of Coline walking alone into the white void becomes a manifesto of contemporary wandering: escape as the only form of freedom, silence as the only possible truth. It is no longer just the story of a woman, but the account of a humanity adrift, unable to find a home, destined to disappear into the cold wind of a world that no longer belongs to it.

17-Feb-2025 by Beatrice