In the Cut

Starring Meg Ryan, Mark Ruffalo and Jennifer Jason Leigh…

In the Cut

Starring Meg Ryan, Mark Ruffalo and Jennifer Jason Leigh

Directed by Jane Campion

“In the Cut,” which borders on being an endurance test, is at least the anti-Meg Ryan film. Fans of the actress who turn out for this one will likely be frustrated by its ponderous narrative, disgusted by its nasty crime scene carnage and shocked by its overt sexuality.

It’s a thriller, by the way.

Ryan plays Frannie Avery, a sexually repressed writing professor who is drawn into a grotesque nightmare – director Jane Campion has intermittent success using half-blurred photography and other devices to make the film feel like a dream – of murder and dangerous, irrational desire. This isn’t as provocative as it might sound.

What the film attempts to achieve is somewhere around the territory of Roman Polanski’s classic “Repulsion,” an unnerving film about a woman deconstructed by her repression. “In the Cut,” however, is hinged to a stilted serial killer mystery.

Campion and Susanna Moore – Moore wrote the novel on which the film is based and the pair co-wrote the screenplay – create a murderer whose methods are a cynical reference to modern marriage patterns: The killer “marries” women, placing a wedding ring on their finger, then, promptly, “divorces” them by cutting them to pieces.

During the killer’s rampage, ironically, Frannie and her equally lonely half-sister Pauline (Jennifer Jason Leigh) seem to long for men to enter their lives and marry them. This is despite their family history – Frannie’s father proposed to her mother on a whim with a ring meant for another, later divorced her and eventually went through a total of five marriages. Frannie’s romantic vision of the proposal, seen by us in off-kilter silent-movie style footage, acts as a bizarre chorus for the film.

When a piece of one of the victims is discovered in Frannie’s garden, Detective Malloy (Mark Ruffalo) comes into her life to question and promptly seduce her. His crudeness and aggressiveness make her – and us – uneasy, and she has good reason to believe he might actually be the killer, but she can’t bring herself to resist his advances.

She’ll have to solve the mystery to know whether to feel good or bad about sleeping with him.

It’s not exactly thrilling, by the way.

The film is a rather grand failure – in large part because of how unwieldy and off-putting the material is – albeit an interesting, ambitious one with excellent performances. Ryan digs deeper into this than you’d ever expect; there is no doubting the pain of her character’s journey. Leigh and the ferocious Ruffalo also thrive in offbeat roles.

And the final stab: Despite how far the film strays from typical thriller territory, its ending is unforgivably conventional.

“In the Cut” is strictly for the curious. And even then, it’s not necessarily worth two hours.