Critics reviews

It has its share of cat-and-mouse clichés, but Campion's penchant for gauzy close-ups and frenetic coverage exercise their own kind of alchemy, transforming the film from titillating late night cable staple into a claustrophobic meditation on power and sexuality. While the more lurid scenes between Ryan and Ruffalo have bogarted its decade-plus reputation, the film has aged (quite well, for some of us) into an unlikely record of early 21st-century urban paranoia.

Perhaps the sharpest example of Campion’s impulse, as it excavates the lived experience of erotic desire and – at times bloodily – disarticulates fantasies of romance...Campion revises the codes and the conventions of the erotic thriller by foregrounding female agency – and, in the process, inverts the gender politics of scopophilia – to affectively express the erotic imagination and tactile sensitivity of "In the Cut’s" heroine.

Cerebral, quiet and observing, her gaze pulls out words and phrases from her environment, and Campion's filmmaking style powerfully shuts off outside influences, zeroing in on Frannie's focused and obsessive collection of ideas.

As finely wrought as "In the Cut" is, one could argue that it fails as a genre exercise. Experienced thriller fans will guess the killer quicker than it takes to recite an Emily Dickinson poem. But once the mystery's burned away, what's left is a minutely etched study in mood and female psychology.

The plotting and police procedural aspects of "In the Cut" are perfunctory and unconvincing, and for all its air of breaking new ground, it is ploughing down some familiar furrows.

Is Campion slumming, then, or trying to reappraise a maligned bargain-basement genre? I think neither. Maybe I'm wrong, but I suspect Campion isn't that interested in the erotic thriller as a form; her film clearly takes itself very seriously, with no apparent genre-referencing irony, as a study of female sexuality and its dark outer edges... But Campion also make sex's attendant fantasies a painfully solemn matter, and that's where the film ends up looking ridiculous.

Campion and Susanna Moore, who collaborated on the adaptation of Moore's novel, may want audiences to think they've created a groundbreaking, grisly woman's picture, a sort of post-feminist "Seven." Don't believe it. "In the Cut" is yet one more serial-killer police procedural, with provocative sexual politics thrown in for a distracting, if glancingly authentic, frisson.

Even so, if "In the Cut" falls short of the masterpiece Campion intended, it's unquestionably the most ambitious and important film to come along in months... In time, [it] will be understood as a near-great achievement. Meanwhile, there's Ryan's performance to savor... it's the best work [she] has ever done.

["In the Cut“] is kind of a shambles. The key supporting characters are awkwardly used, as if the movie thinks it ought to have them but doesn't know why.

It looks unhappily as if the high-minded director Jane Campion and her main character are dipping a quivering toe in the waters of non-PC sexuality. As if giving a lecture on film noir, Campion insists, with unworldly pedantry, on just how dangerous and erotic every detail is supposed to be.

"In the Cut" suffers from a fatal emotional and erotic imbalance... Trying to convey the hot, panicky claustrophobia of New York’s urban underworld, Campion can’t complete a frame without throwing technique at us. Which makes watching "In the Cut" nearly as much hard work as making it must have been.

This skeevy little erotic thriller feels like a "Basic Instinct" knock-off washed through some half-baked political surrealism...Disinterested in the genre requirements of a thriller, Campion instead dwells on the dirty talk and sexual experiments of her two leads... [but] "In the Cut" fails to communicate the same complexities about men and women that Campion has more deeply explored in her earlier films.