Movies like The Virgin Suicides

Coppola films the doomed French queen as a teenage girl marooned in a gilded palace, all pastel cakes and pop songs, lonely inside the most watched life in Europe. It cares nothing for history-book duty and everything for the feeling of being young, adored, and completely alone.

It is the closest sibling to The Virgin Suicides, made by the same director in the same key: a girl observed by everyone and understood by no one, gorgeous surfaces hiding an ache. Both films turn isolation into something dreamy and let mood carry the whole thing.

Luca Guadagnino sets a first love in a sun-drunk Italian summer, where a seventeen-year-old falls for the older student staying with his family and the whole season seems to slow down around them. It is sensory to the point of physical, all peaches and stone and heat.

It shares The Virgin Suicides' gift for making adolescence feel like a place you can never return to. Both films are steeped in longing and golden light, and both understand that the ache of a first, impossible love is inseparable from the summer it happened in.

Joe Wright's adaptation of Ian McEwan opens on a hot English estate in 1935, where a thirteen-year-old's misunderstanding sets a lifelong tragedy in motion. It is ravishing and formal, obsessed with memory and the stories we tell to survive what we did.

Like The Virgin Suicides, it filters youth and desire through a haze of hindsight, and treats a single golden day as the thing everything else refers back to. Both films are gorgeous and grief-struck, and both know that some part of adolescence gets frozen and never thaws.

A woman looks back on a package holiday she took with her young father when she was eleven, piecing him together from camcorder footage and memory. Charlotte Wells's debut is quiet, oblique, and quietly shattering by the end.

It shares The Virgin Suicides' central act: trying to understand someone you loved by watching them from a distance you can never close. Both films are built out of longing and haze, and both leave you aching for a version of a person that memory can only half hold.

Five orphaned sisters in a Turkish village are gradually locked into their family home after a moment of innocent fun scandalizes the neighbors, their world shrinking as marriages are arranged around them. It is furious and tender at once.

The echo of The Virgin Suicides is almost eerie: sisters watched, controlled, and shut away from a world that cannot handle their becoming women. Both films are about girlhood treated as a threat to be managed, and both find heartbreak and defiance in the same house.

Sean Baker follows a six-year-old running wild around a purple budget motel in the shadow of Disney World, her summer a mix of mischief and danger she is too young to fully see. It is candy-colored and heartbreaking, shot mostly at a child's eye level.

It shares The Virgin Suicides' way of holding childhood in a beautiful, saturated light while something sad gathers at the edges. Both films let you see the world the way a kid does, all vivid surface, and both save the full weight of what is happening for the moment it can no longer be avoided.

Set in 1970s San Francisco, this follows a fifteen-year-old aspiring cartoonist recording her sexual awakening into a tape diary, including an affair with her mother's boyfriend. Marielle Heller films it frankly and without judgment, letting animation spill out of Minnie's notebooks.

It shares The Virgin Suicides' focus on the inner life of a teenage girl the adults around her cannot read. Both films are set in a dreamy, drifting 1970s, and both insist that a girl's desires and confusions are a whole world, not a problem to be solved.

Gia Coppola's debut drifts through the lives of bored California teenagers, hooking onto a shy girl and the older coach circling her, in a fog of parties and half-formed longing. It is loose, hazy, and steeped in the same suburban dread as the film that gave the whole family its style.

It is The Virgin Suicides' spiritual descendant, made by Sofia Coppola's niece and carrying the same soft-focus melancholy about adolescence. Both films watch teenagers drift toward danger they can barely name, and both care more about the mood of being young and lost than about any plot.

Gus Van Sant follows a teenage skateboarder in Portland carrying the weight of an accident he cannot tell anyone about, drifting through school and skate parks in a fog of guilt. It is elliptical and hushed, told out of order in grainy, dreamy images.

Like The Virgin Suicides, it keeps its teenager at a remove and lets you feel his inner weather more than follow his story. Both films are less interested in explaining a young person than in floating inside their haze, where dread and beauty blur into the same thing.

On Valentine's Day 1900, a group of Australian schoolgirls climb a volcanic rock during a picnic and some of them simply never come back, with no explanation ever offered. Peter Weir films it as a waking dream of white dresses, cicadas, and heat, and refuses to solve a thing.

This is the ancestor of the whole genre, and The Virgin Suicides is unthinkable without it: unreachable girls, a haze you can never see through, and a disappearance the film treats as a mystery of youth itself. A fitting place to end, since everything dreamy and vanishing here started with this rock.