FROM THE FIRST SHOTS of mist drifting past trees dripping with Spanish moss, Sofia Coppola’s The Beguiled moves with a languid, hypnotic menace. Most gothic melodramas seem to take place in a hothouse. This film takes its character and pace from the humid Southern air that slows everything and reduces the humans trapped inside to the helpless conviction that the relief they’re waiting for will never arrive.
And yet, at 93 minutes, this streamlined version, based both on Thomas Cullinan’s 1965 novel and Don Siegel’s 1971 film, is over before you know it, leaving you a little dazed, as if you’d woken abruptly from under a spell. Set in a girls’ boarding school in 1864 as the Confederacy realizes it’s going to lose, the story is about the sexual tensions that arise when a wounded Union soldier (Colin Farrell) is discovered and taken in to recuperate. The headmistress (Nicole Kidman) is wary of the newcomer, as both a man and a Yank, but finds herself drawn to him, as do a younger teacher, Edwina (Kirsten Dunst), and a precocious student, Alicia (Elle Fanning, exuding the inchoate lyricism that makes her a wonder to watch). You wait for the tensions— male-female, North-South, innocence-experience, lustlove— to explode. And they do, but the explosions hit you on the rebound, like the distant cannon fire that is one of the audio accompaniments in this often nearly silent movie.
Siegel’s version was lurid but calculatedly so, not out of any emotional commitment to the material. And with a smirking Clint Eastwood as the soldier, the story—which Cullinan told entirely from the points of view of the women— became a simpleminded demonstration of how devious women are.