Cook, and Josh Hartnett, with Scott Glenn, Michael Paré, Jonathan Tucker, and Danny DeVito in supporting roles.
The film earned largely positive reviews from critics, with the performances of the cast, Coppola's direction, visual style, and soundtrack receiving praise.
Unattainable due to their overprotective Catholic parents, math teacher Ronald Lisbon and his homemaker wife Sara, the girls—Therese, Mary, Bonnie, Lux, and Cecilia—are enigmas who fill the boys' conversations and dreams.
Her therapist, Dr. Horniker, suggests to her parents that Cecilia's suicide attempt was a cry for help, and she would benefit from wider interaction with her peers, particularly boys.
However, after other boys make fun of Joe, a teenager with Down syndrome, Cecilia excuses herself and commits suicide by leaping from her second-story bedroom window, impaling herself onto a spiked iron fencepost below.
After winning homecoming King and Queen, Trip persuades Lux to ditch their group and take a walk on the football field, where they end up having sex.
Horrified, the boys rush back upstairs, only to stumble across the body of Mary in the kitchen who put her head in the gas oven.
The boys realize the girls killed themselves in an apparent suicide pact: Therese overdosed on sleeping pills upstairs, and Lux died of carbon monoxide poisoning by leaving the car engine running in the closed garage.
Unsure of how to react to the events, the adults in the community go about their lives as if nothing traumatic happened, or even making fun of the suicides, but the boys cannot stop thinking about the Lisbon sisters and why they did what they did.
[7] For the part of Lux, Coppola auditioned numerous actresses, but had a "gut choice" of Kirsten Dunst, who was sixteen years old at the time of her casting.
When I met Sofia, I immediately knew that she would handle it in a delicate way... [she] really brought out the luminous aspect of the girls; she made them like ethereal angels, almost like they weren't really there.
"[9] The Virgin Suicides was filmed in the summer of 1998 in Toronto, Ontario, standing in for suburban Detroit, Michigan,[8] on a reported budget of $6 million.
A separate soundtrack album was released on March 28, 2000, featuring music from Todd Rundgren, Boston, Heart, Sloan, The Hollies, Al Green, Gilbert O'Sullivan, 10cc, Styx, and two tracks by Air (one previously recorded; one composed for the film).
The site's critical consensus reads, "The Virgin Suicides drifts with a dreamlike melancholy that may strike some audiences as tedious, but Sofia Coppola's feature debut is a mature meditation on disaffected youth.
[7] Graham Fuller of The New York Times gave the film a middling review, writing: "Ms. Coppola has made [...] a haunting metaphysical celebration of adolescence with the aura of a myth.
Yet, on the surface, there is something wrong with this picture: how can a film in which a quintet of apparently normal girls commit suicide possibly be a celebration, and why would a filmmaker attempt to make it so unless she is uncommonly perverse?
"[27] Roger Ebert gave the film three-and-a-half out of four stars, and positively compared it to Picnic at Hanging Rock (1975): "[Coppola] has the courage to play it in a minor key," he notes.
Scenes from the film (first kisses, gossiping about neighbors) are sinewy in nature and seem lifted from the pages of a lost photo album.