Sofia Coppola, recently awarded Best Director at the Cannes Film Festival for The Beguiled, is a vapid filmmaker whose main talent lies in celebrating the languor of the world she knows: a world of wealth, travel, leisure, and pretty clothes worn by photogenically discontented people. Most of her imagery would fit perfectly in the pages of Vogue, Vanity Fair, or Harper’s Bazaar.

The Beguiled follows the conventions set up in Coppola’s past works, like Lost in Translation, Marie Antoinette, and Somewhere. Coppola maps her own cossetted worldview onto every project, and so The Beguiled once again treats its viewers to a dreamy vision of leisure and plenty for the beautifully dressed but emotionally troubled. This time, it’s set in the American South, a location that has long enthralled Coppola because, as Corey Atad quotes her in a recent Slate review, “It’s so exotic and different.”

Adapted from Don Siegel’s 1971 film of the same name, based on Thomas P. Cullinan’s 1966 novel, The Beguiled is a macabre Southern Gothic set during the last year of the Civil War at a ladies’ seminary in Virginia. The headmistress (Nicole Kidman) and her young charges wait out the war in desperate isolation, locked behind iron gates and alarmed by the approaching cannon fire.