Sofia Coppola’s The Virgin Suicides is the cinematic equivalent of staring at a beautiful corpse for 97 minutes—gorgeous to look at, but emotionally cold and starting to smell by minute 20. Released in 1999 and hailed by critics as a dreamy meditation on adolescence, mortality, and nostalgia, it’s really just a soft-focus funeral for narrative momentum. A film so obsessed with aesthetics, it forgets to give its characters actual personalities—or, God forbid, a pulse.
Sofia Coppola’s The Virgin Suicides is the cinematic equivalent of staring at a beautiful corpse for 97 minutes—gorgeous to look at, but emotionally cold and starting to smell by minute 20. Released in 1999 and hailed by critics as a dreamy meditation on adolescence, mortality, and nostalgia, it’s really just a soft-focus funeral for narrative momentum. A film so obsessed with aesthetics, it forgets to give its characters actual personalities—or, God forbid, a pulse.
Adapted from Jeffrey Eugenides’ novel, The Virgin Suicides tells the story of the five Lisbon sisters—Cecilia, Lux, Bonnie, Mary, and Therese—through the eyes of a group of neighborhood boys who talk about them like they were mythical wood nymphs instead of actual teenage girls. The youngest, Cecilia, kills herself early on, setting the tone for what is essentially one long, slow-motion obituary disguised as a coming-of-age story. The film is told through gauzy flashbacks, lingering stares, and narration so drenched in wistful detachment it sounds like it was recorded in a bathtub full of expired Prozac.
The cast includes Kirsten Dunst as Lux Lisbon, the only sister given anything resembling screen time or a personality. Lux is the “wild one,” which in Coppola’s universe means she occasionally smokes cigarettes and has sex on rooftops while staring into the existential void. Dunst does her best, flashing those sad, vacant eyes like she’s been possessed by Lana Del Rey’s ghost a decade before Lana was even famous. The rest of the sisters might as well be background wallpaper—blonde, soft-spoken, and so indistinct you’d need dental records to tell them apart.
James Woods plays the uptight, ineffectual father, and Kathleen Turner—fully committed to the role of buzzkill—plays Mrs. Lisbon, a woman so repressed and emotionally constipated you half expect her to beat the girls with a Bible wrapped in plastic. These parents are strict, sure, but cartoonishly so. They cancel prom because their daughter stayed out late. They treat adolescence like a communicable disease. They’re so one-note they might as well be played by animatronic puppets at the “Dysfunctional Family” exhibit in Epcot’s Haunted Suburbia ride.
But even the parents aren’t really characters—they’re just vaguely authoritarian set dressing. And that’s the central issue with The Virgin Suicides: it’s not interested in human beings. It’s interested in the idea of tragedy. Of beauty. Of loss. It treats its female protagonists like tragic Grecian statues who exist solely to make the narrator sad and horny at the same time. The girls don’t speak so much as whisper. They don’t live so much as float. They are symbols, ghosts, and figments of male memory, drifting through the story like perfume and disappearing before they can do anything messy like exist.
Let’s talk about the boys—the narrators, who recall the Lisbon sisters with the breathy reverence of a guy who once saw a girl drop a pencil in high school and never emotionally recovered. The film’s voiceover (provided by Giovanni Ribisi, sounding like he’s narrating a eulogy for a perfume commercial) turns their obsession into mythology. “We felt the imprisonment of being a girl,” they intone, as if peering through binoculars and breathing heavily from behind shrubbery gives you an honorary uterus.
The male gaze isn’t just present here—it’s the entire operating system. Coppola’s camera is practically a peeping Tom with an MFA. It fetishizes sorrow, girlhood, and tragedy in equal measure. Every frame is soaked in soft lighting and vintage melancholy. It’s like a Pinterest board curated by Edgar Allan Poe’s influencer niece. Even death is aestheticized to the point of parody. One sister dies in a pristine white nightgown. Another in a softly lit garage, like she’s modeling for Suicide Illustrated.
Coppola, to her credit, has a visual style. She shoots like a poet—if the poem was about staring out windows and nothing happening. There’s a lot of lingering. On clouds. On faces. On creaky floors. The entire film seems allergic to plot, character development, or anything resembling stakes. It’s all vibe. Vibe with a side of repression. If you’re into the idea of watching pretty people be sad in slow motion while Air plays on the soundtrack, congratulations—this is your Citizen Kane.
But for those of us who like our films to say something, or at least try, The Virgin Suicides is a whole lot of aesthetic blue balls. It hints at commentary—on female agency, on suburban ennui, on the prison of femininity—but never actually says anything. It gestures vaguely toward feminism while keeping the girls locked behind a gauze curtain of male fantasy. The sisters are victims, sure, but also weirdly inaccessible—less people and more celestial metaphors. We don’t know what they want, what they dream of, or what drives them to their collective end. We only know what the boys thought they saw. Which is: a lot of pretty sadness and maybe a boob or two.
The final act is supposed to be devastating. The girls, one by one, take their lives. And yet… it lands with the emotional weight of a scented candle being blown out. It’s tragic in theory, but in practice it feels like a music video that forgot to fade out.