In the Cut is a 2003 psychological thriller film written and directed by Jane Campion and starring Meg Ryan, Mark Ruffalo, Jennifer Jason Leigh and Kevin Bacon.

The film focuses on an English teacher who becomes personally entangled with a detective investigating a series of gruesome murders in her Manhattan neighborhood.

[7][8][9] Frannie Avery, an introverted writer and English teacher in New York City, meets one of her students, Cornelius, at a local pub to talk about coursework.

[4] Contemporary On Rotten Tomatoes, the film has a score of 33% based on reviews from 174 critics and an average rating of 4.86/10; the consensus reads: "Jane Campion takes a stab at subverting the psycho-sexual thriller genre with In the Cut, but gets tangled in her own abstraction.

[15] Todd McCarthy of Variety wrote: "Beautifully crafted and highlighted by an arresting change-of-pace [performance] by Meg Ryan as an English teacher erotically awakened by a homicide detective.

Club wrote: "Though the oppressive artiness makes the early scenes fairly ridiculous, the director's odd methods add rare tension to the climax, as it becomes evident that the finale won't be so predictable in Campion's hands.

"[17] In a positive review for the Los Angeles Times, Manohla Dargis wrote “the film is filled with surreal, hothouse flourishes that tell the story as vividly and often more eloquently than either the plot mechanics or dialogue”, adding that it “may be the most maddening and imperfect great movie of the year”.

[6] Mick LaSalle of the San Francisco Chronicle said although In the Cut “falls short of the masterpiece Campion intended, it's unquestionably the most ambitious and important film to come along in months”.

[18] Ann Hornaday of The Washington Post wrote although the film was flawed as a thriller, it's not such a write-off as a psychosexual portrait of a certain kind of single Manhattan woman at the turn of the new century.

With its restless, jittery camera, the movie captures the jangly paranoia of a city that is often equally tantalizing and threatening; Frannie responds in kind, with her own contradictory sexual persona, which at certain times is defiantly autonomous and at others almost timidly girlish.

A Looking for Mr. Goodbar for the post-9/11 age (the remnants of that tragedy form one of the movie's many visual leitmotifs), In the Cut focuses on the darker face of the classic New York romance.

Within an otherwise flawed, forgettable movie, Campion has managed to offer a vivid, if fleeting, glimpse of the wariness, self-deception and fear that shadow so many illicit thrills of sex in the city.

[5]Hornaday also singled out Ruffalo's performance, writing the actor is “unsettlingly convincing as a man whose sexual magnetism lies not in leading-man good looks but in his ability to portray himself as both a protector and, if the situation warrants, a predator”.

Critics noted how Campion emphasizes female agency and pleasure, and subverts many tropes of the genre such as the femme fatale archetype and the male gaze.

[21] Writing for Fangoria, Zach Vasquez said the film succeeds at both combining "the lurid aesthetic of Bava/Argento with a modern examination of violent patriarchal power dynamics",[9] citing Campion's "use of speed ramping, slow motion, lens flares, and more".