Like many, I misjudged this Jane Campion outlier when it first came out, wondering why such an acclaimed director would waste her time on a serial-killer erotic thriller. Even based on The Piano alone, I should have known that sexuality as a dangerous force was central to her filmmaking. That’s literalized with In the Cut, which stars Meg Ryan as Frannie, a college writing instructor whose New York City neighborhood is plagued by a series of grisly murders. Among the suspects: Frannie herself, considering a body part was discovered beneath her window; her stalker ex (an electrically unnerving Kevin Bacon); a flirtatious student (Sharrieff Pugh); and the sexually forward investigating detective (Mark Ruffalo) with whom Frannie begins a conflicted affair. On this viewing, Ryan’s distant, near-catatonic performance struck me as perfect, capturing Frannie as a woman so exhausted by the constant threat of male violence in the air that she walks through life in a wounded daze. Ruffalo is even better; he makes this vile, possibly corrupt cop somehow also understandably irresistible, which seems to be a recurring quality of Campion’s male characters. The cinematography by Dion Beebe, who also worked with Campion on Holy Smoke, blurs the edges of the screen, further suggesting the dulled, blinkered perspective through which Frannie goes through life—a particularly risky way of living if a killer has you in their sights. In the Cut may not be pure Campion (it’s adapted from a Susanna Moore novel, with Moore co-writing the screenplay), but I now realize it’s also the sort of movie only Campion could have made.
(10/27/2021)
