Between “The Virgin Suicides” and “Marie Antoinette,” it was already quite clear that Sofia Coppola loves watching Kirsten Dunst struggle to make peace with some kind of purgatory. In “The Beguiled,” the mustiest and most conventionally entertaining film of Coppola’s brilliant career, Dunst is once again cast as a woman with so much to give and nowhere to go, but this is the first of her characters who actually has a legitimate hope of escaping from her limbo.

Alas, peace can be hard to come by in the middle of a war, and freedom even harder. And if Edwina Dabney wants to get herself out of the Confederacy, she might have to let the Union inside first.

Ruthlessly shorn from…

39/100

I remain The Unpersuaded re: Coppola, who here flattens a lurid, trashy melodrama about symbolic castration into Virgin Suicides II. Weirdly, she believes that she's inverted focus, like this is Grendel to Siegel's Beowulf:

Anne Ross, my production designer, a couple of years ago told me, “You have to see The Beguiled. You need to make a new version of it or make a remake.” And I was like, “I would never remake a film.” But I saw it, and it just stayed in my mind. I thought it’d be interesting to tell the same story, but flip it to the women characters’ point of view—the idea of these women cut off during that time, left behind during the…

"Is he dead?"
"No. Not yet."

Much more playful & much less suspenseful than the trailer would lead you to believe. By telling this story through the eyes of the women, Coppola is able to milk the comedy of the situation. I mean, imagine being a young, chaste girl with very little exposure to men, and then Colin fucking Farrell suddenly shows up in your home. Not to mention he's injured, weak, and seemingly downright pleasant.

Of course, nothing is ever this simple. We know going into this film, as it is a retelling of the eponymous 1966 novel, that this is not going to end well. These "vengeful bitches" add a femininity (in the conventional sense of the word) to…

91/100

Like a slow burn horror movie, Sofia Coppola's The Beguiled patiently corrodes its viewers from the inside with a morally dubious set of characters put in a delicate situation and an unnerving soundtrack that consists mostly of silence, contrasting sudden diegetic sounds and noises that can raise one's heartbeat simply by appearing. It suffocates us with its natural cinematography - bathed by gentle sunlights by day, drenched in everlasting darkness by night save only for the punctual hot flames of lit candles that occasionally blanket our characters in their warmth -, a claustrophobic aspect ratio and the narrow location. With simple details such as these, Sofia creates a crushing atmosphere that keeps us prisoners for the entirety of the…

Creo que con esta pelicula, Sofia Coppola alcanza su madurez: contenida y ya deshecha de algunos de sus tics (marca de la casa por otra parte), empieza creando un ritmo que lleva a engaño porque aparentemente reposada, es toda una bomba de relojeria de miradas y pulsiones soterradas. Y digo que es su obra más madura, porque no son tanto las actrices (que están soberbias) sino que es el recorrido de la mirada de la Coppola por la casa y por las afueras de la casa, los sonidos continuos que nos vienen desde el exterior, lo que a mi entender da fuerza a esta obra y, poco a poco la átmosfera se va apoderando de toda la situacion. Y por…

A strange yet winning mash-up of high-brow period drama, psychosexual-psychological thriller and dark, dark comedy? Yes please. The Beguiled feels unique and daring, with a wildly veering tone which never feels inconsistent or unfocused.

What surprised me though was how funny it all is. The barely-suppressed libidos, the petty competitiveness, the sheer macabre humour of the horrible incidents that befall Colin Farrell's wounded soldier. It really elevates a film that could have easily been staid to something that's pretty damn fun. Which is not to distract from how atmospheric it is, with its natural lighting and sparse ambient score, but period dramas aren't usually my thing due to the formal constraints of the genre. The Beguiled doesn't rock the boat…