John McBurney (Colin Farrell) is a man who needs a woman's touch. At the start of Sofia Coppola's sensational new adaptation of Thomas P Cullinan's novel The Beguiled, this Union soldier is stranded somewhere in rural Virginia, bleeding out beneath a canopy of cypress and Spanish moss.
The booms of battle ring out arrhythmically nearby, and searching footsteps crunch through the trees, but it isn't Confederate troops who find him. Rather, it's Amy (Oona Laurence), a 12-year-old pupil of the Martha Farnworth Seminary for Young Ladies – one of the few girls still in residence at the school, as the Civil War creeps ever closer to their gate.
Amy sees a soul in need, and helps McBurney stagger to the seminary, where Miss Farnworth herself (Nicole Kidman) cleans and stitches his wounds. Recumbent on the divan, with pretty girls attending to his needs, he looks as if he's in heaven. Little does he know he's a pigeon among cats.
When it was announced last year that Coppola was remaking Cullinan's novel for the screen, many of us who'd seen the 1971 Don Siegel version, with Clint Eastwood and Geraldine Page, had our interests prickly piqued. How on earth would this famously understated filmmaker – who won an Oscar for her fine-drawn screenplay for Lost in Translation (2003) – handle a story whose previous screen adaptation took in incest, misogyny, lesbian fantasies, explicit sex and bloodletting, and an early scene in which the hero rasps at a 12-year-old that she's “old enough for kisses” before planting a smacker on her astonished lips?
Here's how. Coppola has pruned away almost everything outside her comfort zone, then distilled the plot down to a slender, refined and witheringly funny morality tale in which a tight-knit sisterhood is destabilized by one man, with growingly horrific consequences – for him. The Beguiled won Coppola the Best Director prize at Cannes earlier this year, and it's absolutely that kind of film: coolly poised but with ticklish spots all over.