The Beguiled

The Beguiled (2017) is Sofia Coppola's drama you can watch online on iFILM. In the war-torn American South, a wounded Union soldier turns up at the gate of a secluded girls' boarding school.

One of the students finds the injured corporal, John McBurney, played by Colin Farrell, and brings him inside the quiet mansion where a handful of women and girls live cut off from the fighting. At first they shelter and nurse him out of plain decency. Then the household shifts. Headmistress Martha (Nicole Kidman), teacher Edwina (Kirsten Dunst) and the older pupil Alicia (Elle Fanning) begin to compete for his attention, and politeness starts to hide jealousy and quiet calculation.

Coppola shot this as a chamber piece, candlelit and nearly without a score, and the work earned her the Best Director prize at Cannes. It draws on Thomas Cullinan's novel, once filmed with Clint Eastwood, but the tension here lives in glances and things left unsaid until a final turn rewrites who holds the power. Stream The Beguiled (2017) online on iFILM.