Every few years, it seems, Meg Ryan gets the urge to be taken seriously as an actress. This is worth noting because fans of her romantic comedies (or anyone in the mood for a little suspense) won't likely enjoy this film—which has a narrow audience. Gruesome, sadistic and just rather unpleasant, In the Cut is an erotic-thriller for masochists.
Ryan plays a repressed English professor living in New York. While meeting one of her students in a bar, she goes looking for the restroom but instead happens upon a woman "servicing" a man in the shadows. Ryan's curiosity gets the better of her and she lurks out of sight for an unhealthy amount of time. When the woman turns up dismembered the next day, Ryan finds herself at the center of an investigation to catch a brutal serial killer.
She even gets mixed up romantically with the detective (Mark Ruffalo, just seedy enough to be questionable) heading the investigation. Throw in Ruffalo's partner, Ryan's student, and her neurotic ex-lover (an un-credited Kevin Bacon, in his second murder-mystery of the month), and you have enough red herrings to go fishing all day. I suppose the film is meant to be a cautionary tale about the dangers of desire, but it's difficult to empathize with a lead character who keeps wandering off to secluded places with imposing men she hardly knows—especially when there's a serial killer roaming free.
This lack of common sense is surprising, seeing as feminist filmmaker Jane Campion—supposedly an expert on women's intuition—has directed the film. What you can always count on in her films, though, is a lush musical score, lavish scenery (she even gives grimy Manhattan a certain artistic stylization), a story involving a strong-willed woman and the men who try to manipulate her, a surprise ending, and enough full-frontal nudity to make Paul Verhoeven flinch. What's new to the formula are buckets of gore.
The problem isn't that the film is so terribly made—it features a talented cast (including Jennifer Jason Leigh in the stereotypical role of Ryan's half-sister) and the still formidably gifted Campion—it's just not very involving and at times quite repulsive. There isn't much violence on screen, but we see the grisly aftermath (severed limbs and all) in so much detail the screenwriters feel the need to come up with a word like "disarticulated" to describe it.