Rough Cut

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New York City during this summer's power failure didn't look as murky as it does in In the Cut. Jane Campion's new erotic thriller gives Lower Manhattan a sooty, abused tone that movies haven't often shown since the '70s. But it's appropriate for two characters inching their way toward moral blackout: Frannie (Meg Ryan), an English professor, and Molloy (Mark Ruffalo), a police detective on a serial-killer case. Both are drawn to dark spaces, where strange creatures crawl and sick excitement comes in all sorts of packages.

Frannie has tiptoed down into one of those spaces — the basement of a seedy bar — and witnessed a sex act. The woman on the giving end is later decapitated, and Molloy grills the reluctant teacher as a hostile witness who has something to hide. Don't we all? That's what In the Cut, based on Susanna Moore's novel, wants to say and show. If the lure of finding out repels you, then the filmmakers have succeeded. You've heard the movie is sexy. There is sex, of a kind, but it's notable only because it happens to Ryan, who for decades, it seems, has been Princess Perky, and who is fine, not great, in the role.

Anyway, the sex is mostly in the talk, which is in its way as violent as the grisly murder tableaux. Ruffalo's whispery voice, his Brando-wannabe mannerisms and the ambiguities of a shady cop in a whodunit — he's one of those movie characters who are guilty until proved interesting — make Molloy's every flirtation sound like a threat, a dirty secret, a dream as scary as it is seductive. In the Cut prizes atmosphere over coherence; it's as much a thing of pieces as the corpses on display. So don't expect a thriller with standard satisfactions. Instead, tiptoe in and have a guilty peek at Hollywood when it takes its own rare walk on the grown-up side.