The Beguiled (2017)

Mississippi, 1864.  The American Civil War rages across the country, including in the region near the Farnsworth Seminary for Young Ladies.  While out picking mushrooms, one of the younger students finds an injured Union soldier.  Despite the man being an enemy, she leads him back to the school for medical treatment.

Local Confederacy regulations call for the school's owner, Miss Farnsworth, to alert the authorities to the man's presence.  However, she fears that sending him to the prison camp in his current state would be a swift death sentence, and resolves to wait to tell them until he is well enough to survive.

At least, that's what she tells herself, her students, and the school's limited staff.  The fact that he's a handsome and quite charming young man might also have affected her decision.  It has certainly affected several of the other women at the estate.

Of course, the women's interests and motivations are not necessarily mutually attainable, and there's always the question of what their new guest's intentions might be: the situation is apt to become complicated!

If any of this sounds familiar, it's because there was a 1971 film based on the same novel, which I reviewed about eighteen months ago.  Some people have a fundamental aversion to remakes.  I am not one of them, and am often interested to see how new writers, directors and actors will approach such a project.  (For the record, I'm particularly interested in seeing how new writers and directors would approach The Hobbit.  Less so the actors, since I think the cast of those films did a good job).

Ahem.  In any case, what this means is that when it comes to remakes, or (as this more accurately is) new adaptations of the same source material, I'm pretty interested in how the films differ.  On that front, this offering falls a little short, I think.  It is somewhat different in that it tends to tell the story more through the viewpoints of its female cast, rather than its one prominent male character.  I like this aspect of it.  The problem - though only for someone who has already seen the earlier film - is that it does very little else that feels new or novel.

If you haven't seen the 1971 film, this is I think the better overall offering.  If you have seen the earlier one, it may not offer a sufficiently distinctive experience to be the optimal use of your 95 minutes.