Snowy exterior shots and painted backdrops for a dark fairy tale with disturbing moral implications. Death is a benevolent old man with a sickle who lives in a magical cavern full of pendulums – the lives of men – and disturbing little devils with wings drawn on their chest. When he takes a baby from its mother, she cannot come to terms with it until the other future is shown to her in a magic spring proving to her that it could be worse: disgrace. In the closing emblematic shot, two daggers pierce her heart. Mystical.

“Some time ago this company [Ambrosio] released an extremely poetic picture entitled The Snow Maiden [La fanciulla della neve]. It seems not improbable that the same author and pro­ducer fashioned this picture; but though it is a fantasy in some ways like the former, it has a very different, brutal quality, and is very much poorer art. In the first place, the idea behind it is pes­simista – not quite normal. It is usually left for some officious idiot to comfort a mother’s grief by telling her that if her child had lived, he might when he had grown up have been a cause of grief to her. The picture of Father Time’s big clock room is as unreal as somebody else’s dream; yet it was a very good idea to show the pictures that the mother saw, under a thin film of rippling water – the effect is weird. These brutal scenes, which were shown as possibilities, comforted the mother, so the pic­ture shows, and made her glad that her boy lay dead. She wanted him dead”.

Anonymous, “The Moving Picture World”, New York, 19 August 1911