In The Cut

Director: Jane Campion

2003 / 119min / 35mm

Desire and suspicion twine together in Campion’s impressionistically photographed film maudit feminist giallo, based on a novel by co-screenwriter Susanna Moore, about a meekish New York City English teacher (Meg Ryan) who becomes passionately sexually involved with a police detective (Mark Ruffalo) after he comes to question her about the murder of a woman whose severed head has been found outside her home, her hunger for the brutishly swaggering cop only increasing as her hunch that he may be the killer himself grows stronger. “Astonishingly beautiful… [An] unnerving fusion of hot sex, icy sentiment and warm-running blood… filled with surreal, hothouse flourishes.” —Manohla Dargis, The New York Times