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Sofia Coppola's anaemic re-envisioning of Don Siegel's 1971 The Beguiled was there, deliciously arch in its delivery but risking little so that her foray into sensual Southern Gothic ultimately felt just too nice,

The film has been heralded as an epiphanic work by her apostles and derided as a stilted retreading by her detractors. The truth is probably somewhere nearer the middle. With her usual immaculate compositions, simmering undercurrent of disquietude, and aural fixations, Coppola makes a convincing argument that she's one of America's most aesthetically consistent auteurs, though not necessarily one its greats.

It's a steamy scenario, but the film proceeds matter-of-factly through chores, lessons, meals, and prayers. It emphasizes languid procedure even as its dark comedy of manners turns to Gothic horror. Editor Sarah Flack, who started out working with Soderbergh, has pared this story down to its essentials. It's just action and consequence, one following the other like day follows night.

I'll admit that Coppola's aesthetic in this film isn't as empty as I'd first thought, and so too there's more to be learnt here about race than we might initially assume – as the brilliant Claudia Rankine reminds us, "it's important that people begin to understand that whiteness is not inevitable, and that white dominance is not inevitable..." But I haven't changed my mind about how lacking in motivation Coppola's characters are when it comes to actions that are integral to the plot.

Coppola plots her plot and themes into a rhythmic repeating dance, whose mushroom-picking and formal dinner scenes recur with tense new meanings, and her direction is fluid but purposeful. Rather than employing the drifty, languid pace of her previous films, The Beguiled is concise, even taut, wrapped up in a neat 94 minutes. Yet it's also richly textured, thanks to cinematographer Philippe Lesourd's bleached palette and candlelit interiors.

I've long been convinced by the clichéd details of some of the deaths—the sister hanging herself while in schoolgirl attire is particularly relevant here—that there was only one death and that the men created the mythology of mass suicide as an expression of their own sexual frustration. In The Beguiled, Coppola and cinematographer Philippe Le Sourd create a look that has heavy psychological overtones.

More than one review has described Coppola's Beguiled as a fairytale but, if so, it is closer to Angela Carter than Charles Perrault. Christian charity mixes with sexual curiosity. Coppola's remake is more contemplative and psychologically complex than the original, as well as more suspenseful—particularly if you anticipate the corporal's drastic fate.

The film is exquisitely realized, with strong ambience, carefully modulated performances, and a painterly attention to textures... [It's] better directed than it is written, however. In its study of interpersonal rivalry and sexual tension, the film doesn't say anything that wasn't better articulated in Don Siegel's 1971 adaptation of the same source material. Coppola's movie contains most of the same incidents as Siegel's, yet her adaptation doesn't grant them the same depth.

Billed as a fresh take on Thomas Cullinan's 1966 novel about a wounded Union soldier in hiding at the school, Coppola's screenplay meticulously softens or eliminates everything that was bold and frightening about Siegel's 1971 film version . . . A potentially chilling moment involving the death of a pet is rushed and anticlimactic, as is the sexual betrayal. After the would-be Gothic goings-on have run their course, the movie fades out with the same hushed, humid prettiness with which it began.

Those who are more ardently inclined toward Coppola's body of work than myself will sometimes offer the pure sensorial pleasure of her films as their first line of defense, protesting that those preoccupied with plumbing the depths of her films fall prey to overlooking the luxuriant surfaces, a style that in itself is substance. On this level, too, there's little to enthuse over in The Beguiled, which finds the director's gifts as a mesmerist faltering.

The casting is sharp. Kidman bringing her A-game facade of frostiness, desiring while wanting to appear otherwise. Dunst is equal parts shy and rebellious; Fanning is slyly, recklessly adolescent. The movie is imperfect for its worldview, but not, to my mind, irresponsible. It's a movie about a specific window on the world, well aware of its specificity. Even as its limits prove disappointing, it makes sense to the movie, I think, that the real story is what's hovering just beyond the frame.

Siegel's film is punctuated by constant exposition in the form of voiceover; the women dwell on their loneliness and lust with artless declarations. But in Coppola's film, which astonishes with its immersive ambivalence—each woman's clipped tightness is mixed with a teetering abandon—there is no broadcasted inner voice.