I don’t know when it started, but films that open with shots of suburbia give me the chills.  Oak-lined streets, white picket fences, moms watering the lawn, kids playing basketball, dads barbequing – should I really find them that creepy, or is American Beauty still fresh in my mind?  You practically expect something alarming to happen, like for the camera to pan down and reveal a human ear lying in the grass (a la David Lynch’s Blue Velvet).

It’s no Blue Velvet, but The Virgin Suicides has a development just as disturbing.  And all it takes is one line to snap you out of the suburban daydream – “Cecilia was the first to go.”  The images of moms and dads and lawns and fences are replaced with one of a thirteen-year-old girl in a bathtub filled with crimson-tinged water.  It’s akin to a slap across the face.  And like Lester Burnham’s opening monologue in American Beauty, that line gives you an idea of what to expect from the rest of the film.

Cecilia (Hanna R. Hall, young Jenny in Forrest Gump), we learn, is the youngest daughter in the Lisbon family.  The Lisbons (James Woods, Any Given Sunday and Kathleen Turner, Baby Geniuses) are the parents of five beautiful teenaged daughters that look like they just stepped out of a Golden Grahams commercial.  There’s fourteen-year-old Bonnie (Chelse Swain, sister of Lolita’s Dominique), fifteen-year-old Lux (Kirsten Dunst, Dick), sixteen-year-old Mary (A.J. Cook) and seventeen-year-old Therese (Leslie Hayman).  Together, the Lisbon daughters form their own little clique of well-developed, blonde girls, which, as you might expect, attracts the attention of every teenaged boy within pheromone range.

But the Lisbon parents are maniacally strict, barely allowing their voluptuous flock to leave the house, let alone date boys, which only makes the forbidden girls more tantalizing.  In fact, Suicides is told from the point of view of a boy that lived in the neighborhood (Giovanni Ribisi, Boiler Room, provides the narration but does not appear in the film).

Like other similarly aged young men that lived near the Lisbons, the narrator explains their infatuation with the girls led them to find and collect Lisbon memorabilia.  They still talk about them, even though the events that play out in the film transpired twenty-five years ago.  The boys-turned-men have a burning desire to know what went on in the Lisbon house, but just don’t have enough information to piece the past together.

While Cecilia’s suicide was a major catalyst for the actions of the other Lisbon girls, Trip Fontaine (Josh Hartnett, Here on Earth) was certainly another.  The most popular boy in school, Trip successfully woos Lux with his rock-star swagger (and a wig like Kelso on That ‘70s Show), but then ditches her after a school dance, setting off a chain of tragic events in the Lisbon house; events that nobody seemed to care about but the narrator and his friends.

Suicides is full of amazing performances from everyone, including the interchangeable Lisbon girls.  Woods character gets nuttier and nuttier as the film progresses and things in his house begin to spin out of control.  The luminous Dunst chalks up another fantastic performance – it’s hard to believe she just turned eighteen.  But the surprising standout acting-wise is Hartnett, who gets so far into his role that you’ll likely forget that it’s him.  Scott Glenn (Firestorm) and Danny DeVito (Drowning Mona) also appear in one scene apiece.

Suicides is the directorial debut of Sofia Coppola, the daughter of Oscar winner Francis Ford Coppola, who, until now, was probably most famous for playing Mary Corleone in The Godfather, Part III or, at best, the wife of last year’s Oscar-nominee Spike Jonze (Being John Malkovich).  But Sofia proves here that’s she’s just as talented as her pop, her Oscar-winner cousin (Nicolas Cage), her Oscar-winning grandpa (Carmine Coppola), her Oscar-nominated aunt (Talia Shire) or her husband.  Coppola adapted the script from Jeffrey Eugenides’ debut novel of the same name, and pumped the music full of great period music (but not stuff that you’re tired of hearing in films), like Heart, Todd Rundgren, ELO and Janis Ian.  The standout score was provided by the French band Air.

1:38 - for strong thematic elements involving teenagers