‘The Beguiled’ Cannes Review: Sofia Coppola, Nicole Kidman Deliver a Southern Gothic Hoot
There’s a moment about an hour into Sofia Coppola’s “The Beguiled” when you just know that things are about to get lurid.
[...] her version of the book that also produced a 1971 potboiler starring Clint Eastwood has been relatively restrained — more slow burn than hysterical, all mood and menace instead of melodrama.
[...] Colin Farrell, playing a wounded Union soldier who’s been taken in by a girl’s seminary in Virginia during the waning years of the Civil War, beds one of the girls and incurs the wrath of a couple of others … and gets pushed down the stairs, reopening the gory leg wound that put him there in the first place … and wakes up to find that headmistress Miss Martha, played by Nicole Kidman, has kindly amputated his leg while he was out.
Miss Martha gives Corporal John McBurney a sponge bath, and has to stop herself and take a deep breath when she gets close to his crotch; a few minutes later, a mere conversation between McBurney and Kirsten Dunst’s Miss Edwina leaves her clutching the door frame and breathing hard.
[...] this version of the story has a languid pacing that fits the setting of a stately mansion usually sunk into darkness, light struggling to come through the heavy drapes.