Sofia Coppola’s The Beguiled (2017) is a movie where absolutely nothing happens—and then a leg gets sawed off. That’s not a spoiler. That’s mercy. Billed as a smoldering Southern Gothic drama with feminist overtones, it’s actually a cinematic yawn in a corset, so languid and muted it makes an actual coma seem like a rave. Watching this movie is like being stuck in a polite standoff between people who only communicate in whispers, furtive glances, and lace doilies.
Adapted from Thomas Cullinan’s novel (which also spawned a far juicier 1971 version starring Clint Eastwood), Coppola’s take is drained of heat, bite, or blood. She’s removed all the grit and grime and left behind a bleached-out chamber piece where everyone looks like they’re waiting for a ghost to ask if they’d like more lemonade. The Civil War may be happening outside, but inside this Virginia girls’ school, it’s all about repressed sighs, baking lessons, and whether Colin Farrell’s beard is an appropriate reason to abandon morality.
Let’s start with Farrell, playing Union soldier John McBurney, who’s found wounded in the woods by a young student and brought back to Miss Martha Farnsworth’s Seminary for Young Ladies—a finishing school conveniently located on the corner of Southern Decay and Emotional Sterility. He’s bleeding, vulnerable, and smoldering like a sentient bottle of cologne. Within minutes, every woman in the house—from child to spinster—is making eyes at him like he’s the last biscuit at the cotillion.
Nicole Kidman plays Miss Martha, the headmistress, with the stiff authority of a woman who hasn’t blinked since Fort Sumter. Her idea of crisis management is gently dabbing sweat off a man’s forehead like she’s polishing silver. Kirsten Dunst is Edwina, the emotionally frayed teacher whose repression has aged her into a human sigh. Elle Fanning is Alicia, the sultry teenager who turns every hallway into a runway of longing stares and ankle flashes. These women don’t so much talk as speak in italics. Every interaction is loaded with subtext, tension, and the growing sense that nobody in this house owns a functioning personality.
The problem is that Coppola doesn’t give them much to do beyond flirt, stitch, and glower. The house becomes a kind of estrogen-filled purgatory, where sexual tension builds not like a powder keg, but like a scented candle slowly losing the will to burn. We’re told there’s danger and desire. What we see is a bunch of very well-dressed people having very intense thoughts about apples.
Farrell’s character, for all his supposed charisma, is basically a slab of man-meat with an Irish accent and enough sleaze to seduce a farmhouse. Is he manipulating them? Falling for them? Bored and horny? It’s hard to say. He’s charming enough in a dinner theater sort of way, but the script gives him nothing but vague flirtations and one predictable meltdown, and by the time he’s hobbling around in a post-surgical rage, you’re mostly rooting for the table to collapse and put everyone out of their misery.
Coppola’s decision to strip the story of its grit and racial context (she controversially removed the enslaved characters present in the source material) makes this version feel like a sanitized fever dream. It’s Gone with the Wind minus wind, plot, or stakes. Everyone is perpetually damp, vaguely horny, and spiritually asleep. The film floats through its 93-minute runtime like a ghost that doesn’t really want to haunt anyone, just hang around and maybe redecorate the curtains.
Even the big moment—when things turn dark, when choices are made, when legs are removed—feels oddly muted. There’s no crescendo, no real horror, just a tidy, art-directed scene where horror becomes just another aesthetic. You don’t gasp. You blink, slowly, and think, “Huh. That’s unfortunate,” as if someone had just spilled a bit of jam on a white glove.
The cinematography is classic Coppola: pale, hazy, and overexposed like someone filmed an Ambien commercial with a fog machine. Every shot is composed like a still life of sexual repression. Candlelight glows. Spanish moss sways. Dresses rustle. Emotions do not. The entire color palette is so pastel it feels like watching human beings drown in a Laura Ashley catalog.
The score, if you can call it that, consists mostly of atmospheric hums and eerie silences, which might have worked if there were any actual tension to score. But tension requires stakes, and here there are none. No one grows. No one changes. They all just rearrange their inner turmoil like antique furniture, waiting for the inevitable storm that turns out to be a mild drizzle.
And the dialogue? Wooden. Sparse. Reverent in that self-important way that whispers, “This is Art,” while you whisper back, “This is nap time.” It’s all hushed tones and awkward pauses, as if everyone’s been told the camera is allergic to emotion. When characters do speak, it’s often to deliver lines that seem designed to kill the momentum deader than a Confederate general’s career.
Look, Sofia Coppola has a thing for sad, beautiful people drifting through sad, beautiful spaces. But here, the style has finally swallowed the substance. The Beguiled is so obsessed with restraint that it chokes itself. It wants to be a smoldering psychological drama about power, gender, and desperation. What it is, is a 93-minute staring contest set in a wallpaper museum.
Rating: 1.5 out of 5 surgically removed limbs.
Watch it if you enjoy genteel boredom with a side of leg amputation and would like to experience the Civil War through the eyes of women who are deeply bored, slightly aroused, and emotionally upholstered in beige. Otherwise, beguile yourself elsewhere.