A fine, disturbing romance

She is known as America's sweetheart thanks to a string of hit romantic comedies, including Sleepless In Seattle. Wholesome, perky and ingenuous, the characters she is famous for make Meg Ryan, perhaps, the closest thing the modern cinema has to Doris Day.

Now, as though mocking that connection, the opening music of her new film is a minor-key version of the classic Day number, Que Sera Sera. Its jangly discords set the mood for a story loaded with fatalism and foreboding.

In The Cut is a romance, but a disturbingly twisted one. The lovers meet during a nasty murder inquiry; the body has been, in policespeak, "disarticulated".

Ryan, as a withdrawn and solitary teacher of creative writing, is a potential witness. He is a homicide detective with a tiny, tell-tale tattoo on his wrist which might, or might not, be the sign of the killer.

When they start to investigate each other at closer quarters, there are no funny fake orgasms - like Ryan's celebrated one in When Harry Met Sally - only raw carnal skirmishes between two sexually greedy people. Ryan gives a career redefining performance.

Her baby blue eyes stare out from behind opaque tinted specs. The fluffy blonde hair has been replaced with a straggly, mouse-brown crop. Blunt and ambiguous, Mark Ruffalo is just as unconventional as the male lead, and even manages to prove a man can look cute with a moustache.

In The Cut is also a departure for director, Jane Campion. After her rarefied forays into female desire in The Piano and Portrait of a Lady, this is her first film set in America.

The police procedural side of it does not, stand up to close scrutiny, but as a plunge into sex and the city, it's a hot, vertiginous ride.

Opening Night Gala: In The Cut
Cert: N/A