In the Cut

“Everything you know about desire is dead wrong.”

In a New York neighborhood where young women are turning up murdered, Frannie Avery (Meg Ryan) teaches writing and keeps mostly to herself. A detective, Giovanni Malloy (Mark Ruffalo), comes asking questions about the killings nearby, and she starts an affair with him. Jane Campion follows the two of them as the case tightens, and the film treats desire and fear as sensations that arrive together and are hard to tell apart.