Review: ‘The Beguiled,’ Sofia Coppola’s Civil War Cocoon

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“The Beguiled,” Sofia Coppola’s new film, looks like a historical drama — it’s set in Virginia during the Civil War — but it often behaves more like a fairy tale. In the first scenes, a young girl ventures out into the woods to collect mushrooms and finds a strange man under a tree: a Union soldier with a badly wounded leg and a charming Irish brogue. Is he a prince or an ogre? (He’s Colin Farrell, which may or may not clarify the issue.)

That is only one of the questions that hover in the humid, crepuscular air. The soldier, Cpl. John McBurney by name, finds himself convalescing in a plantation house, formerly a girl’s boarding school, occupied by his rescuer, Miss Amy (Oona Laurence) and her teachers and classmates. The matriarch of the group — there are six of them in all — is Miss Martha (Nicole Kidman), who occupies an intriguing middle ground between fairy godmother and wicked stepmother, a zone that is familiar real estate for Ms. Kidman.

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Is McBurney a prisoner or a guest? Is he a threat to his hosts or is it the other way around? Who is beguiling whom? Ms. Coppola approaches these matters with her signature mix of intensity and detachment. Decorum is observed — grace is said before meals; corsets are tightened; French verbs are conjugated; everyone is called “miss” — but under the surface all kinds of strong emotions seethe and simmer. Even at midday the place has a gloomy, twilight quality. (The cinematographer is Philippe Le Sourd.) Mist and cannon smoke from a distant battlefield hang amid the Spanish moss. The atmosphere is too genteel to be gothic, but it is haunted nonetheless, by intimations of disorder, lust and violence.

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“Nous sommes des filles” the girls recite during their lessons, and “The Beguiled,” which remakes and revises Don Siegel’s 1971 film (with Clint Eastwood in Mr. Farrell’s role), is in part an essay on the nuances and paradoxes of femininity. It’s also the portrait of a group of ladies sorted by type and temperament. Miss Amy is sharp-witted and intellectually curious. Miss Jane (Angourie Rice), the princess of the group, is imperious and judgmental. Miss Emily (Emma Howard) is openhearted and obliging. Miss Alicia (Elle Fanning) is sullen and sneaky. Miss Edwina (Kirsten Dunst) applies herself to her duties with an air of disappointment. They find themselves competing for McBurney’s favor as he sets about manipulating their vanities and insecurities, smiling like a tomcat who has stumbled into a cage full of canaries.

Like many of the characters in Ms. Coppola’s other films, Miss Martha and her charges dwell in a realm apart from the ordinary world, a gilded bubble that is both cocoon and prison. Some of this is a matter of circumstance. Versailles in “Marie Antoinette,” the Chateau Marmont hotel in “Somewhere,” the Tokyo Hyatt in “Lost in Translation” and suburbia in “The Virgin Suicides” and “The Bling Ring” — all of these are environments designed to quarantine their privileged residents from the disorder and misery of life.

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