When I mentioned to an acquaintance that I was on my way to see In the Cut, she crinkled her nose and asked, ‘Is that the movie where Meg Ryan has brown hair?’

Well, yes. And, as much of the entertainment media has reported with salivating prurience, the film, directed by Jane Campion and based on Susanna Moore’s novel, also features the first nude sex scenes of Ryan’s 20-year career.

For Ryan, the erstwhile romantic comedy queen whose dimming box office and salacious tabloid history have had many a pundit gleefully predicting the end of her career the film marks a seemingly conscious attempt to revitalize her image and gain access to different kinds of roles.

Sadly, In the Cut, a messy, angry, alternately overblown and mesmerizing thriller, is the kind of ambitious half-failure that seems destined to be swallowed whole by its attendant hype. Sure, Ryan’s resumé is littered with dramas (Flesh and Bone, When a Man Loves a Woman, Courage Under Fire, Hurlyburly, City of Angels), but Campion’s paranoid tale of urban female victimization is an entirely new realm for her (executive producer Nicole Kidman was originally slated to star).

Ryan plays Frannie Avery, a writer who teaches English at a public high school in New York City. In her spare time, Frannie interviews her students in order to compile a lexicon of urban slang (one of the pleasures of Moore’s novel is that the author re-creates Frannie’s research, complete with such syntactical nuggets as ‘taint’) and hangs out with her desperately unhappy half-sister Pauline (Jennifer Jason Leigh). After a woman in Frannie’s building is savagely murdered (her body ‘disarticulated,’ as one character puts it), Frannie begins an erotically charged affair with James Malloy (Mark Ruffalo), the gruffly fascinating detective on the case.

Malloy attracts Frannie with a mixture of plainspokennness and inscrutability. At first he seems like a misogynist. As more dismembered bodies pile up, Frannie begins to suspect that he might be a killer.

It’s been a while since we’ve seen a good, old-fashioned, ’70s-style thriller of urban sexual paranoia. In the Cut recalls Looking for Mr. Goodbar and Klute in its portrayal of the city as a playground of erotic danger. Cinematographer Dion Beebe (Chicago, Campion’s Holy Smoke) uses a variety of focal lengths to blur the edges of certain shots at times it seems as if the film itself is sweating.

Campion, whose reputation is for slightly more highbrow material (The Piano, The Portrait of a Lady), seems to have taken great pains to distance the film from the paperback pulpiness of its storyline (and I’ve seen straight-to-video erotic thrillers with fewer plot holes). The plot may be right out of soft-core Cinemax, but Campion adds visual metaphors, an obsession with syntax and language and some genuinely powerful imagery.

Whether or not Ryan successfully uses this film to sidestep the schadenfreude that the public reserves for aging actresses who used to be ‘cute’ (no one would be mentioning the nudity if Kidman or Leigh or Julianne Moore or Laura Linney or Kate Winslet or Gwyneth Paltrow or Jennifer Connelly or Naomi Watts had played the role), she manages something striking here. Gone are the crinkly-eyed smiles and bemused double takes.

In their place are absolutely no mannerisms at all. Instead, she convincingly conveys a grim world-weariness and a sad recognition of the inevitable intertwining of fear and sexual desire (by contrast, Kidman is far more self-consciously ‘damaged’ and just as naked as a battered wife in The Human Stain). Her chemistry with the ever-impressive Ruffalo, who manages to seduce the viewer into thinking he could be both genuinely dangerous or completely innocent, is palpable.

Campion has foolishly changed the ending of Moore’s novel, and the film’s closing scenes send the story sputtering to a halt. My advice would be to ignore what’s happening in the last 10 minutes of the film and just enjoy the seductive malevolence of the images.

By the end of In the Cut, the older male critics at the screening were vocally disparaging the film. But, then, this is the world of Jane Campion, so that’s not necessarily a bad thing.