In The Cut

She sure has perfected that celluloid orgasm. From the verdone table-smacking "Yes! Yes!" in When Harry Met Sally to her quietly responsive writhings in In The Cut, Meg Ryan certainly has grown up.

And this sense of growth not only extends to her fleshy bits, but to her acting skills, which are skillfully restrained in this erotic thriller. In the film, she has ditched her thatch of choppy blonde hair and has pushed aside those John Lennon sunglasses in deference of a more real character.

Ryan plays New York writing professor Frannie Avery. With her dowdy blouses, mousy hair and blusher-less face, In The Cut is Ryan's Monster - a film in which she can show the world that there's more to her than a cute bunny nose and fish lips. In a recent interview, she said she was puzzled when people assumed she wasn't bright. "I'm always surprised when people are surprised I'm smart," she said.

However, when you figure that most of the films Ryan is remembered for are fluffy romantic comedies, you can't blame people for thinking that her talent lies in kooky smiles and not cerebral ponderings.

However, she puts paid to those assumptions in In The Cut. While it seems most of the world hated this adaptation of the book by Susanna Moore, I found it compelling, erotic and deliciously odd. Some reviewers have said that director Jane Campion, known for her feminist touch and aesthetic intuition, has lost her way with this film.

Others reckon that the whodunnit plot about a serial killer on the loose clashes with the film's artistic style. And still others argue that the unlikely coupling of Ryan's character and that of newcomer hunk Mark Ruffalo is so improbable it's laughable.

However, it was exactly these clashes which kept me swept up in the New York scenes unfolding on the screen. The result is a pervading sense of strangeness which settled beautifully in my post-movie brain.

The story goes like this: Frannie (Ryan) is a depressed, repressed professor who collects words in the form of scribbled-down poetry quotations, and she is compiling a collection of Brooklyn slang from her students. She is miserable, only comforted and cared for by her sister Pauline (Jennifer Jason Leigh).

When a woman is murdered outside her flat - her body decapitated - Frannie meets the investigating cop Detective Malloy (Ruffalo), a rough-talking Burt Reynolds type who seduces her with his oral charms.

Lots of sex ensues, with lingering shots of Ryan's rather floppy breasts and some highly charged eroticism. And true to Campion's style, the focus of the sexual encounters are on the woman's pleasure, and Ryan gets to take her Harry Met Sally performance into seeming reality.

During the film, we meet various people who sweep in and out of Frannie's life - and they could all be the killer. Frannie's creepy ex-boyfriend (played by Kevin Bacon) is losing the plot and having panic attacks.

One of Frannie's students has turned in a sympathetic dissertation on the life of serial killer John Wayne Gacy and Malloy's partner is a homophobic misogynist who likes fat women and oral sex.

Even Malloy provides signs that he could have been the killer, and through an artful script and jumpy film techniques, we get an insight into Frannie's neuroses, and are exposed to the possibility that no-one can be trusted.

Poetry and symbolism embroider their way through the film. Frannie looks for meaning in the poetry quotes written in the subway carriages. She confronts the killer at the end near a symbolic blood-red lighthouse (To The Lighthouse is one of her favourite books). And there is meaning in handcuffs, a petal storm over a slice of New York.

Some have found this laughable. I found it wonderful.

This gets an eight out of 10.