Parents' Guide to

The Virgin Suicides

By Nell Minow, Common Sense Media Reviewer

age 17+

Intense movie about teen suicide; violence, sex.

Movie R 2000 97 minutes
The Virgin Suicides Poster Image

A Lot or a Little?

What you will—and won't—find in this movie.

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age 14+

Based on 7 parent reviews

sav.angeline
sav.angeline Adult
January 26, 2023
age 14+

14 and up!

I watched this movie when I was 14. I understood it, and why the characters had done it, and the negative affects of the strictness of the parents. I would say MATURE 14 year olds can watch this. There's a brief sex scene, and one of the girls becomes a sex addict. There's lots of conversations to have while watching this movie, and the book is great too. The stories really important, but make sure your child knows what big a deal suicide is, rather than how some people might glamorize it.

This title has:

Educational value
1 person found this helpful.
doctora
doctora Parent of 5-year-old
June 1, 2022
age 17+

Haunting and complex

Haunting...yes...stylized...yes...Sofia Coppola succeeds in creating a film that centers male gaze as the plot device and showcases adolescence in its cold complexity. There are no definitive answers in the film, no satisfying plot developments, just questions and more questions as we bear witness and are still left in the dark, or blinded by the light emanating from this film.
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What's the Story?

Set in the mid-1970s, THE VIRGIN SUICIDES is the story of five exquisitely beautiful sisters who dazzle and beguile the boys around them. Amid the idyllic suburban stillness, there are intimations that all is not right. Huge elm trees are diagnosed with Dutch Elm Disease and ordered to be cut down. And the youngest of the Lisbon girls, only 13, tries to kill herself. The doctor shakes his head, "You're not even old enough to know how bad life gets." She looks up at him, sadly, wrists wrapped in white gauze, "Obviously, doctor, you've never been a 13-year-old girl." A quarter of a century has passed, but the boys who longed for the Lisbon sisters can't forget them. They hold on to relics and totems: a diary, scribbled notes decorated with hearts and stickers. And they tell each other over and over the events of that time, hoping that this time they will make sense. There is no explanation for the unthinkably terrible act, and the movie doesn't try to provide one. Like the boys, we pore over their lives, looking for a point at which they might have made a different choice.

Is It Any Good?

Our review:
Parents say (7):
Kids say (15):

First-time director Sophia Coppola, who also wrote the screenplay, based on the book by Jeffrey Eugenides, has a wonderful eye for detail and composition. The production design is perfect in every detail. There are painfully accurate moments as teenagers try to make conversation ("How'd your SATs go?" "You're a stone fox!") and connection (when the boys finally call the girls on the phone, all they can bring themselves to do is play records to them). Kirsten Dunst is marvelous as the most adventuresome of the girls, and Josh Hartnett is fine as the high school hunk with a broken heart for every puka shell around his neck. And the narration, beautifully read by Giovanni Ribisi, is lyrical and moving.

But ultimately, the movie falters. It tries for metaphor -- those dying elm trees, an asphyxiation-themed debutante party at which people wear gas masks decorated with glitter, the girls as princesses in a tower waiting for princes who can't save them. And it tries for distance from its time or milieu. But like the collection the boys hold onto for years, the movie has "not life, but the most trivial list of mundane facts."

Talk to Your Kids About ...

  • Families can talk about how The Virgin Suicides addresses teen suicide. How does it convey a time when society was just beginning to come to grips with the problem? What are the various ways in which the adults respond after the first suicide?

  • This movie is based on a novel. What would be the challenges in adapting a novel into a movie? How does the movie use different viewpoints in a way that might be similar to a novel?

  • What are some of the ways in which the mid-1970s are conveyed through things like clothes, music, and rapidly evolving changes in values and beliefs in the culture at large?

Movie Details

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