The women at the center of Sofia Coppola's The Beguiled, led by Martha Farnsworth (Nicole Kidman), never really come across as complex characters whose paths change a whole lot throughout the narrative's ninety-plus minutes. At the Southern school where they work during the closing stages of the American Civil War, a wounded Union soldier (Colin Farrell) finds himself in need of care, and eventually, against their better judgement, they take him in and nurse him back to health. Eventually, each girl, especially Edwina Morrow (Kirsten Dunst), develops the hots for the young hunk, who begins to play each of them accordingly for his own personal reasons.
The movie's set-up is far superior to its final act, which is tarnished by lots of anger, yelling, and unnecessary threats that fizzle into... nothing, mostly. The sexual tension we sense early on is hardly explored, and by the time the women decide to commit that deadliest of sins, the result is more of a thud, rather than a bang (I mean, these are times of war, after all, so the final act of doom is hardly shocking). The problem here is with the original material (based on Thomas P. Cullinan's novel, A Painted Devil), and not with the direction or the actors (Farrell is particularly good, as an alternate version of Odysseus on an island full of seductive sirens). It's too bad that the narrative never really took a chance to shock us for real, because as constructed, it's a movie that would've been provocative some six or seven decades ago, but hardly today.
C+
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