CREEP SHOWS.('In the Cut,' 'Mystic River,' 'Elephant')(Movie Review)

Publication: The New Yorker

Publication Date: 27-OCT-03

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COPYRIGHT 2003 All rights reserved. Reproduced by permission of The Condé Nast Publications Inc.

A blood-red New York sky at dusk, a sordid city of graffiti and trash piles, all photographed by a handheld camera that jiggles and stumbles like a drunken sailor about to hit the deck. "In the Cut," Jane Campion's adaptation of Susanna Moore's much praised 1995 thriller, is discordant and creepy right from the opening shots. On the soundtrack, someone sings "Que Sera, Sera," the number that Doris Day belted out at the climax of Hitchcock's "The Man Who Knew Too Much." In this arrangement, however, the anonymous vocalist is accompanied by an aimlessly wandering piano, which makes the song seem neurotic--full of doubt rather than defiance. "In the Cut" is the kind of urban thriller about sex and death that's often described as "disturbing," and it seems at first a strange project for Jane Campion, the director of the masterly erotic drama "The Piano." But no one can say that Campion, working with genre material--a mad killer terrorizing lower Manhattan--leaves her art behind. On the contrary, every frame of "In the Cut" reeks of conscious design. Campion's use of high-contrast color (Dion Beebe did the cinematography) makes the shadows a furnacy black and the lighter shades glaring and harsh. We seem to be trapped in a lurid dreamworld in which the streets are always menacing and the corridors narrow and dangerous, as if the walls were closing in. "In the Cut" is completely controlled and all...

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