The Beguiled review: Nicole Kidman is a camp delight in Sofia Coppola's lascivious morality tale 

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 pricklishly 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 destabilised 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.

Tonally, it’s far less in step Siegel’s rough-hewn romp than Peter Weir’s Picnic at Hanging Rock (1975), the languid rhythms of which were also heavily detectable in Coppola’s own 1999 feature debut, The Virgin Suicides. Very occasionally, it feels slight to a fault: once or twice, Coppola’s determined paring back of her material brings about the storytelling equivalent of a record-skip. 

But for the most part, this is not a film in a hurry: often in the seminary, there’s a sense that time is circling round on itself, as dawns turn seamlessly to dusk and each day blurs into the next. Every scene is by lit by shafts of sun or swaying flames, and composed by cinematographer Philippe Le Sourd like a John Singer Sargent painting come to life.

Back in the 1970s, Eastwood’s version of McBurney was coded as a predator from the start. Farrell’s is a slippery, self-regarding opportunist, and a deliciously contemporary cad. He enjoys being tempter and tempted, fatherly and mothered – and the school’s range of inhabitants, all of whom feel Christian sympathy for his predicament, afford him the pleasure of being all four at once. 

Martha plies him with brandy and bed-baths, and has to mop her own brow afterwards. (So might you.) Amy looks up to him adoringly, Alicia (Elle Fanning), who’s some years older and significantly more worldly-wise, with a lascivious glint. Then there’s Edwina Morrow (Kirsten Dunst), another teacher whose “delicate beauty”, according to McBurney, is the finest he’s seen on all his travels. She’s flattered almost beyond comprehension – and thereafter marked out as an easy target.

In short, no wonder he likes it there. “Your whole flower garden needs tending,” he tells Martha with a twinkle one morning, and he’s not just talking abut the begonias.

Coppola and her cast express the softly shifting chemistry within the school building with consummate control and wit. Scenes are spritzed with minuscule double entendres, telling micro-glances and sly social manoeuvring – there’s a wonderful sequence in which the schoolgirls each claim responsibility for some element of an apple pie McBurney has enjoyed.

It’s the kind of mood that brings out the best in Kidman, whose performance is deliciously subtle, but with a lemony edge of camp that allows her to twist an entire scene with the arch of an eyebrow, a genteel French aside, or a microscopic parting of her lips. 

Perhaps best of all is Dunst, whose softly heartbreaking performance keeps the film lashed to reality as it skulks, late on, back into the woods and towards McBurney’s reckoning. Still, it’s every inch a group achievement, and the film’s best scenes are its ensemble ones: prayers before bedtime, musical recitals, meals by candlelight. In their softly multi-coloured gowns, designed by Stacey Battat, the women are arrayed like flavours in an ice cream counter, and Farrell the boy with his nose pressed greedily to the glass.