MEG SLUMS, AND RESULT IS GLUM.

Byline: Bob Strauss Film Critic

JANE CAMPION has made some marvelous movies (``The Piano,'' ``Sweetie'') and flawed but fascinating ones (``The Portrait of a Lady,'' ``Holy Smoke!'') about unmanageable women and the icky men who try to control them. But with her latest, ``In the Cut,'' New Zealand's most intriguing director gets so mired in the male-generated, female-addling ick that her usual striking insights into desire, emotional manipulation and the sexual power games that result get muddied into mediocrity.

Genre and setting evidently had something to do with that. The film is based on Susanna Moore's novel about a romantically numb writing teacher who falls in lust with the potentially homicidal detective who's investigating a woman's murder in her gritty, Lower Manhattan neighborhood. The adaptation was written by the author and the director, and the film's ending was changed from the novel's ambiguous one to a hokier and less satisfying one.

But the movie will lose most viewers long before that. The mechanics of a whodunit seem well beyond the erudite Campion's sphere of interest, and she appears to think that New York is an even less civilized jungle of brutal male predation than the Australian Outback or the wild, barely colonized coasts of 19th-century New Zealand. Anyway, the terminally depressed women and uniformly dangerous men on display in this sometimes graphic effort often come off as parodies of Campion characters. When you're not wincing at their exaggerated, pathological glumness, you snicker at how baldly self-defeating their gropings for connection play.

That rather unforgivingly said, the honest eroticism Campion creates here will certainly move some individuals as deeply as sections of ``The Piano'' or ``An Angel at My Table'' have. Much has been babbled about Meg Ryan's upfront lovemaking sessions with co-star Mark Ruffalo. To answer the crudest question first, yes, America's tarnished sweetheart has a mighty fine figure. But the real triumph of the love scenes - indeed, the movie's one, unadulterated saving grace - is their unadorned physical and emotional rawness, qualities as rare in American films as the sight of commercial romantic comedy superstars stripped bare.

It's all the other psychosexual unpeeling, the mental and behavioral aspects, that elude Ryan's artistic reach. Though not unconvincing in the role, she too often lets drab brown hair and sleeplessness-enhancing minimal makeup indicate the distress her Frannie Avery should be expressing more specifically.

Traumatized by a serial-husband father and, we're to intuit, a string of poisoned relationships as a result (a lovesick recent ex, played by an uncredited Kevin Bacon, is demonized as an unhinged loser/stalker), Frannie contemplates poetry in her dreary apartment, tutors students who probably want to rape her and communes with her dumber, even more romantically unfulfilled half-sister, Pauline (Jennifer Jason Leigh).

But at least the loopy Pauline knows that the cute, gruff Detective Malloy (Ruffalo, in what may be his most interesting movie role since ``You Can Count on Me,'' though that isn't saying a whole lot) can give her sad-sack sister something she really needs. Frannie soon agrees. Perhaps it's his upfront way of talking dirty to her (though that initially results in her fleeing a bar, only to get mugged). Maybe it's that card hand tattoo of his, which she spotted on the shadowy figure she witnessed receiving oral attention from the dead girl, whose carcass Malloy likes to describe as being found in a ``disarticulated'' state.

Whatever, the officer knows how to follow through on these special brands of foreplay. But the deeper Frannie swoons for him, the more the evidence mounts - in her mind, anyway - that Malloy is a very dangerous individual.

This all unfolds in a kind of dreary inertia (don't even get me started about the dream ice skating sequences or the bluntly ironic subway tableaux) that undercuts the tension of both the mystery plot and Frannie's conflicted inner odyssey. The point being laboriously made - that all men are monsters, though some in a way that really turns girls on - is elementary feminist at its most banal. And ``In the Cut'' will leave just about everybody wanting to jump into the nearest cold shower, whether to cool down or to snap themselves out of grunge-encrusted torpor.

Bob Strauss, [phone]

bob.strauss(at)dailynews.com

IN THE CUT - One and one half stars

(R: nudity, sex, violence, language)

Starring: Meg Ryan, Mark Ruffalo, Jennifer Jason Leigh, Nick Damici.

Director: Jane Campion.

Running time: 1 hr. 58 min.

Playing: The Grove, Farmers Market, Los Angeles; AMC 14, Century City; AMC 7, Santa Monica.

In a nutshell: Honestly erotic sex and dishonest hyperdepression make this character-based murder mystery uncomfortable on many levels and unpleasant overall.

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Meg Ryan and Nick Damici star in ``In the Cut,'' an adaptation of Susanna Moore's novel about a woman's dangerous relationship with a cop, directed by Jane Campion.