The Beguiled (2017)

BBC TWO, 11.15PM; NOT NI ★★★★

♦ This sensational adaptation of Thomas P Cullinan’s novel, from screenwriter and director Sofia Coppola, is set in civil war-era rural Virginia, where a wounded Union soldier (Colin Farrell) seeks refuge in a girls’ school. In Coppola’s understated hands, it’s a slender, witheringly funny morality tale in which a sisterhood is destabilised by one man, with horrific consequences – for him.