In the Cut

kmarus5.0

A movie about the psychosis heterosexual women must endure for being sexually attracted to men. Basically a masterpiece.

Logan Kenny5.0

takes the erotic thriller, a lurid campy and frequently misogynistic genre and recontextualises it to be a feminine and haunting portrayal of a woman's sexuality, with the luridness coming from her desires, her sexual interactions, her satisfactions. campion's formalism here is magnificent, she creates constant unease with her lens by using hazy focusing, constant handheld camera and zooms and almost delirious editing, plays like a low budget domino at points. she captures the filthiness of these streets and their inhabitants perfectly, and uses her almost abstract presentation to its fullest potential in the more erotic/tense sequences. ryan's body is not there to be ogled at, its sexual but not objectifying, her orgasm is important for her not for the audience's arousal. and ruffalo is almost the personification of her desires, although whether or not that's an illusion crafted by him is up to interpretation (he states early in the film that he can be whatever you want him to be). his rugged aesthetic with his moustache and stubble, his passionate gaze, interest in her pleasure, his vulgar and highly sexual demeanour, his way with words. he's undeniably attractive and compelling despite being a bit of a prick, it's easy to get lost in his stare. campion's abstract focusing on small details conveys feelings of paranoia, the world seems like it's falling apart and fear is constant, everything seems like it could lead to death or something worse. and her approach to sequences of pure tension/sexuality is incredible, she knows just when to cut, just where to frame, the perfect atmosphere, the perfect moments. the whole film is dripping in eroticism, and anguish. what lead her to being here in this moment is unsaid yet the pain is present, the details are unimportant but the pain is. the past is a constant presence but rarely directly stated, it doesn't need to be anymore, the events don't matter, just their impact. the desire for true love or the idea of that is embedded within ryan and her sister jennifer jason leigh's characters, within kevin bacon's character, and even within ruffalo's character. so much about these people is conveyed without words or even direct focus, each character feels like a living breathing individual, with all the faults that comes with. but the main element that stood out to me here was the profound empathy. campion's not interested in sensationalist violence, we never see direct violent action, only the scars and the blood, the bodies and the forever changed landscapes. all that's left after death is forever tainted memories, tears and screams. the handling of one death scene is so heartbreaking and emotionally powerful that i almost had to avert my gaze from the screen so i didn't have to see the pain in the eyes. it's definitely got some camp here, the plotting is straight up 70s genre work, but it's beautiful in its tragedies. stone cold masterpiece.

Josh Lewis4.0

Victim of desire. In which a trashy erotic thriller plot involving a misogynistic serial killer who gruesomely "disarticulates" his victims (and leaves their body parts in various locations around NYC) is relegated to the periphery of a sad and confusing drama about a lonely English teacher and all the men in her life (a dotting younger student obsessed with John Wayne Gacy, an eccentric ex who is stalking her, an attractive detective who could very well be the killer in question), and drawn in such a stylistically fractured, blurred, and discolored fashion that when the pulpy genre elements come back into play they feel even ickier and more contradictory. Which is an impressively deliberate tightrope walk Campion performs, as they're absolutely meant to be as troubling and uncomfortable as they feel, and in service of a hazy stream-of-consciousness portrait of what it feels like to be a woman psychologically navigating a world where your pleasure comes attached (handcuffed?) to the violent power and perversions of men ("I'm scared of what I want"); a world where the skin of a lover and a dismembered body part can look eerily similar. Meg Ryan and Ruffalo have some seriously strange yet completely sensual chemistry with each other, while Dion Beebe goes crazy on all the disorienting shallow focus photography of all the sweaty and dingy New York locations, and the often subjective or fetishistic fragmented close-ups/inserts. The big climax is a little sudden and the big reveal a bit obvious (the line in the bar about a "heartbeat" kind of gives the game away) but by the time you get to the part where they have to resolve the mystery and kill the bad guy it's pretty clear how far removed the thriller plotting is from it's real interest in recontextualizing this genre from an equally fearful and horny feminist perspective. I don't think I will be forgetting Ruffalo's delivery on "no sense of cock" or the look on his face while trying to take the decapitated head in a plastic bag out of Ryan's hand, or that scene that starts with the image of a wet dismembered arm being pulled out of a laundromat machine fluidly transition into one of phone sex masturbation. What an odd and filthy movie. Hope Patrick the dog is doing ok.