Sofia Coppola is particularly good at telling unusual women's stories in her signature directorial style, creating films that are as beautiful as they are riveting. (Think 2003's Lost in Translation, 1999's The Virgin Suicides, 2006's Marie Antoinette, and 2013's The Bling Ring.) Her newest offering will be he strangest story she's told yet — and, based on the trailer released Wednesday morning, maybe the darkest.
The Beguiled is a sexy Southern Gothic thriller set at a puritanical, cloistered Southern boarding school for girls in Virginia at the height of the Civil War. The women — played by a stacked female cast including Elle Fanning as a student named Alicia, Kirsten Dunst as a teacher named Edwina, and Nicole Kidman as the headmistress Miss Martha Farnsworth — take in a badly wounded Union soldier (Colin Farrell) found in the nearby woods. While nursing him back to health and getting to know the gentleman, things in the house start to get... weird. In the Southern heat, twisty seductions, jealous rivalries, and sexual tensions are pulled taut among the cooped-up women.
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The ominous, atmospheric movie is based on a 1966 novel by Thomas Cullinan — except the book is told from the soldier's point of view. "The main crux of the story is about the dynamics between a group of women all stuck together, and then also the power shifts between men and women," Coppola told Entertainment Weekly in February. "So for me, it’s very universal, but it’s in this exotic setting of the Southern gentility."
Well, count us beguiled. Watch the haunting trailer below, and see The Beguiled when it hits theaters June 23.