Although the movie has been reappraised as a masterpiece, it wants to remain kind of lost, as adrift from film canonization as its protagonist is from her own desires. “In the Cut,” which premièred in 2003, is Jane Campion’s most ghettoized picture. The Australian director has been lauded for films such as “ The Piano ,” about motherhood and marriage, and “ The Power of the Dog ,” her subversive Western.
But when she takes her interesting periodic leaves from the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, some critics, it seems, are not down. (Some are, such as Manohla Dargis, who described “In the Cut” as an “astonishingly beautiful new film” that might be “the most maddening and imperfect great movie of the year,” but most reviewers expressed pure bafflement, bordering on derision.) The film is about Frannie Avery, an English professor (Meg Ryan) whose erotic revitalization is ignited by her attraction to a cop, Detective Malloy ( Mark Ruffalo ), who is investigating killings in lower Manhattan.
These murders are femicides—the killer targets, kills, and then dismembers women, leaving behind an engagement ring as his signature. To be a woman in the universe of “ In the Cut ” is to be hunted. Marriage is no refuge.
Objections to the movie ranged from aesthetic to moral. Its soft-focus visual world—the sequences of sunbursts obliterating any view of downtown and its people, with those people enveloped in grease and heat—was too pretentious..