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Reviews of Recent Independent, Foreign, & Documentary Films in Theaters and DVD/Home Video
IN THE CUT
A flaccid thriller as lifeless as the film’s many decapitated corpses. Frannie, teacher and
poet, distrusts men (her father abandoned her as a teenager), yet she’s sexually drawn to
Detective Malloy (Ruffalo). He interviews her regarding the killing of a young woman
whose head is found in her garden. Frannie may or may not have seen the killer on the
night in question. Thrown into this morbid mix is a high school student (Pugh) with a
crush on Frannie and serial killer John Wayne Gacy, Frannie’s deadpan half-sister
Pauline (Leigh), a stalking ex-boyfriend, and Mallory’s homophobic partner, Detective
Rodriguez (Damici). Lacking chemistry or passion, Frannie and Malloy’s eventual
coupling is automatic. Although Malloy is blunt and coarse, he is apparently the master of
cunnilingus. Many of their scenes feel disjointed, giving one the sense that they have been
severely edited. It’s as if the actors are in different scenes. But refreshingly, Ryan
abandons the mannerisms of her romantic comedies (as well as her clothes), and instead
effectively retreats behind her glasses and bangs. She looks like The Hours’s Nicole
Kidman (one of the producers) as an attractive Virginia Woolf wearing a summer dress.
(Coincidentally, Frannie teaches Woolf in her class.) Ryan even sounds like Kidman and
brings an emotional depth to her role. But fans of the novel will most likely feel the
film is a compromised adaptation, which is inevitable given the book’s brutality (if
faithfully depicted would have given In the Cut an NC-17 rating) and droll
first-person stream-of-consciousness narrative, which took the reader inside the heroine’s
mind. Instead, there’s not as much, or enough, character complexity. And without the
pace and tension of the detective genre, there’s little to hold interest. As Malloy
says of Frannie, “You’re f------ exhausting,” the same can be said of this film. KT
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