“In the Cut,” which premièred in 2003, is Jane Campion’s most ghettoized picture. The Australian director has been lauded for films such as “The Piano,” about motherhood and marriage, and “The Power of the Dog,” her subversive Western. But when she takes her interesting periodic leaves from the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, some critics, it seems, are not down. (Some are, such as Manohla Dargis, who described “In the Cut” as an “astonishingly beautiful new film” that might be “the most maddening and imperfect great movie of the year,” but most reviewers expressed pure bafflement, bordering on derision.) The film is about Frannie Avery, an English professor (Meg Ryan) whose erotic revitalization is ignited by her attraction to a cop, Detective Malloy (Mark Ruffalo), who is investigating killings in lower Manhattan. These murders are femicides—the killer targets, kills, and then dismembers women, leaving behind an engagement ring as his signature.

To be a woman in the universe of “In the Cut” is to be hunted. Marriage is no refuge. Objections to the movie ranged from aesthetic to moral. Its soft-focus visual world—the sequences of sunbursts obliterating any view of downtown and its people, with those people enveloped in grease and heat—was too pretentious. There was also the upset about Ryan, who shows her breasts—a sweetheart made impure through pulp fiction. The prevailing narrative was that Campion had done the erotic thriller wrong, that her exploration of the hunted woman reeked of a shallow “post-feminist” caprice.

In an era where we crave abject pleasure on the screen, “In the Cut” is ripe for reclamation. It will screen at the Metrograph, in New York, next month, as part of a series that equates the film’s study of female subjectivity with that of Chantal Akerman’s “Je Tu Il Elle.” The movie that “killed” Meg Ryan’s career increasingly has its protectors, who argue that it is a masterpiece, a “vital subversion of male gaze” that ought to have made her stardom more complex. Last year, in an episode of “The Letterboxd Show” podcast pegged to the film’s twentieth anniversary, Campion expressed appreciation for these defenders, though she lamented how long it took for audiences to come around. “The turn took so long, like twenty years, that I gave up,” she said.

Where does the masterpiece allocation get us? “In the Cut” gets in our skin because of its imperfection, as Dargis wrote, its brutal willingness to come to the edges of what can be cinema. The chemical constitution of the film mixes with our own: Frannie’s descent into paranoia and fear is our descent; her desire is our desire. “In the Cut” wants to remain kind of lost, as adrift from film canonization as its protagonist is from her own wants and needs. One reading of the movie’s title is that it’s slang for vagina; this is the meaning that Susanna Moore, the author of the book on which the film is based, has said she intended. But the other reading, which is the one that I’ve always understood, is that of a place that’s hard to access on purpose, that can’t afford to be too known.

The cinematographer, Dion Beebe, makes New York City a swollen crocus. With its ochre palette, “In the Cut” looks like summer, but its volatility matches the tumult of spring. Frannie, meanwhile, is a cinema flower we have to worry about. Ryan’s physical embodiment of the character, all weightlessness, dropped shoulders, and slack mouth, crosses the somnambulance of the nineties model with the mystery of the fifties spinster. She is sober, in her pencil skirts, but she seems drugged, and on what? Language, clearly, and her own solitude. She is working on a book about slang. A magpie, she hoards poetry that she catches on subway advertisements and in overheard koans, decorating her East Village apartment with scribbled-on Post-its. Outside that apartment, men linger. One of her students, Cornelius (Sharrieff Pugh), who is Black, possesses a pomposity—he believes the serial killer John Wayne Gacy to be innocent—that she can’t resist, in a chic, jungle-fever way. Her flirtation with Cornelius, whom she studies, collecting his slang, makes her seem interestingly base. There’s also her recent and resentful ex, played by Kevin Bacon, who circles agitatedly. He can’t understand why Frannie won’t pick up his phone calls. He can’t understand why she’s missing the programming that would make her fall over and submit to him, a capacity that he intuits is present in Frannie’s younger sister, the sanguine and yearning Pauline, played by Jennifer Jason Leigh. Pauline loves so hard that she risks the law. She is reeling over the end of an affair with a doctor, who has filed a restraining order against her. How could a woman, we think, particularly this woman, threaten a man? Men come to the building Pauline lives in; her apartment is above a strip club, to wine down. The spot is fronted by a queer bouncer, played lovingly by Patrice O’Neal, a guardian figure who won’t let the straight suits who roll through think they can leave with anything more than they’ve paid for.

The fungibility of the predatorial role is a preoccupation of this film, which comes into clearer view when Detective Malloy, the third man in Frannie’s orbit, struts his way up to her apartment and undoes it all. Malloy’s entrance into Frannie’s life sets off a story that she, nearing forty, had thought was no longer possible for her. Frannie is romantic about one thing: the love story of her parents. This is a film about how women are as much made by stories as they are by their mothers. It is not a real-life film. And it is not a popcorn thriller, either: the hallmarks of noir—the unknown killer, the hidden gun, the foreshadowed trap—roil only in the background. In one scene, Frannie asks Pauline: has she ever heard the story of how their mother and father met? A silent movie featuring actors cuts onscreen, as Frannie narrates the tale of two lovers being helplessly drawn to each other on an ice rink.

I love Dargis’s reading, in her original review, of the symbolism of “In the Cut” being fairy-tale-like or mythic. What’s shocking about this film is how successfully it estranges its viewer from this city’s real history of dead women. It exploits the predator genre, repurposing its studies of repression and sex. The purview is psychological; the film doesn’t need to concern itself with justice, or with documentary. Despite being a vernacular movie, meaning that it is about up-to-the-minute slang, fashions, and music, it is stocked with classic motifs. From the opening music, “Que Sera, Sera,” a rendition done by Pink Martini, redolent of the uncanny, we feel that the city is under a spell. One explanation for this spell is grief. Campion shot the film in New York City in the summer of 2002, less than a year after 9/11. Not that “In the Cut” is a skyline movie—Beebe and Campion are more interested in pedestrians, the bodies making themselves vulnerable to the will of the street. But the film is centered around fear, and its erotic potential. It’s not a fright, early on, when we learn that part of a body has been found in Frannie’s back garden. It belongs there.

A dark bar, midday. Frannie sits at a booth with Cornelius, where she tries (and fails) to connect with him by discussing his theories about Gacy. Spent by the effort, and turned on by it, too, she excuses herself downstairs, where she is surprised by two people having sex in the shadows. Frannie watches a man receive a blow job; most of what we see, of the act, is the intertwining of hands—blue fingernails for the woman, a spade tattoo on the man’s wrist. It’s a seeming cliché—the inversion of the male gaze, the embrace of female perversity—that Campion quickly complicates. When Frannie leaves the bar, she’s being stalked. The perspective is low and furtive. The camera and her stalker seem one.

In the classroom, Frannie acts like a liberal feminist. “How many ladies have to die to make it good?” she asks her students, who love serial-killer stories. But in her own life she’s not outraged; she’s languorous, she’s curious, she’s a fantasist. “You ever think about just imagining sex. . . . just not really trying to have sex with him in reality?” she asks Pauline, as her sister continues to obsess over her former lover. This thinking woman’s libido brings plenty of drama. Malloy comes to her apartment, expecting free entrance because of his authority, but Frannie makes him wait. When he asks her if she has any knowledge about the limb in her yard, she doesn’t divulge. When she sees a spade tattoo on his wrist, she doesn’t move away. She’s got a shag-like haircut, which reminds us of another New York woman caught in a liaison with a cop, Jane Fonda’s Bree Daniel in “Klute.” But Frannie isn’t a working girl with an overbearing pimp. Her push-and-pull with Malloy has a different power dynamic. She is bringing him into how she anatomizes the world, into her own patterns of observation. When she asks how the killer dismembered the bodies, she hangs on to a word that Malloy uses in response: “disarticulated.” She likes the brio of the term, and she likes hearing Malloy, whom she increasingly suspects may be the killer, say it.

The sex scene in “In the Cut” is famous. Malloy gives Frannie oral sex first; an older woman who broke him in as a teen-ager taught him the art. The sexual culture of the couple, if they are a couple, cannot be understood through anything like sex positivity, just as Frannie’s relationship with Pauline exceeds sisterhood as a trope. Campion explores a kind of heterosexual hyperbole. Malloy’s seduction is an intrusion to Frannie and her high expectations. His sexiness is inseparable from his coarseness, as the film brings both Malloy and Frannie deeper into all sorts of peril. (The movie is also a class film of an endangered sort; Frannie, with her perfect English, and Malloy, with his “ethnic” mustache and Jersey accent, are not caste peers.) When making his overture to her, he promises to give her head, and never to beat her. Is Malloy a good man? Does he know, like some brutal, ancient guru, what women truly want? It’s a question that’s been turned over for these twenty-one years. What we can see is that Malloy is a flesh-and-blood man. He deals in a metaphor-less world of rape, murder, and death. Frannie knows he knows how bad it can get. ♦