Review of The Beguiled, directed by Sofia Coppola

As a young budding film fan who had just graduated from high school, The Beguiled was my introduction to Sofia Coppola as a director. I’ve been a fan of her work ever since, as it was the first time I had watched a movie from a female director’s gaze and filmography.

A lot of what I had watched up until that point had been the classics of American cinema, and I felt like I was sorely lacking when it came to films made by women up until this point. It completely changed the game for me, as I ended up becoming a women’s studies person and now I often write about women in the arts, not just film or literature.

Back then, I used to find out about movies I wanted to watch by combing the film festival Wikipedia pages and simply clicking on every single movie that had been shown at, for example, Cannes Film Festival.

That’s how I had found out about this movie, and I bought a copy on iTunes (remember when we still did that) so I could watch it on my laptop. I’ve now seen the movie three times, and will probably rewatch it again in the future.

Enough rambling! Let’s get into the review.

A Union soldier, wounded, stumbles into a girls’ school in the South.

We travel through this story in Virginia, where Martha Fenworth runs a school in the middle of the Civil War. The year is 1864, and by this point, many of the female students and teachers have abandoned the property, leaving five students and a single teacher presiding on the grounds.

One of the students is Amy, who, at the beginning of the movie, is looking for mushrooms. It’s in the woods she runs into John, a Union corporal that’s wounded and has deserted the army in the process.

Amy brings hime back into the home, and the women decide to lock him in the room as Martha takes care of his wounds. The girls and women there are all interested in who this man is and why he is there, but they debate what to do with him. Should he be taken to the Confederate Army? Martha decides to let him rest and heal before figuring out the next steps, and when Confederate soldiers arrive at the school, they turn them away.

When he wakes up, the girls start trying to get his attention. John reciprocates to two of them, and when his leg heals, he starts helping out in the garden.

He doesn’t want to leave, but Martha decides that it’s time once he’s healed up to go. He desperately tries to stay, and even tells the teacher that he loves her.

One night she finds him in bed with one of the students, the teacher pushes him down the steps, and he breaks his injured leg. Martha realizes they need to amputate the leg to save him, so they do that.

But when he wakes up the next morning, he curses them out and swears revenge.

They lock him in the music room, but Alicia, the girl he slept with, gives him the key. He takes a gun and threatens them, they try to tell the soldiers, but he threatens them again. The women gather when he goes into the shed, and they decide to kill him by putting poisonous mushrooms in the food for dinner that night.

They don’t tell the teacher, as she loves him, and she almost eats the meal herself. He dies after eating the meal, she’s really upset, and then they tie up his body and leave it on the road for the soldiers to collect.

Overall Thoughts

This is very much a tale that screams “beware of men,” and I honestly loved it. There’s a feminine gothic Southern aesthetic that’s pretty prominent throughout the movie, and I quite loved the visuals a lot. I understand the controversy the movie got (in the original there’s a Black maid, which Coppola cut out.

I then noticed her newest movie, Priscilla, featured some kinds of diversity, so I guess she learned from the backlash. Anyways, this isn’t a perfect movie at all, but it certainly was entertaining over the course of its run time for me.

I’d watch it again for sure—just Colin Farrell’s screams of “my leg” kind of crack me up when he realizes it’s gone. You really learn to dislike this man by the end, that’s for sure.

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