“In the Cut” suffers from a myriad of flaws that drown out the originality of Jane Campion’s vision. Campion, best known for 1993’s “The Piano,” has an intriguing view of sex and violence, juxtaposing the two within our mousy English teacher Franny’s (Meg Ryan) mind until she can hardly tell the difference. This creates a similar confusion within the audience.

Campion’s neo-art house camerawork is beautiful half the time and overindulgent for the rest. The most intriguing characterization of Franny is the way she pulls beauty, be it lines of poetry on the subway or visionary students from her high school class, from the rubble surrounding her. Every shot is carefully punctuated with unfocused scenery or foreground action, making for interesting deep space compositions.

Campion also creates her own fictional, ultra-violent version of New York City. Every street shot is presented as if our heroine is either being followed or being suffocated by the bustling threat of constant violence. It seems that no one could survive for long.

The story is a fragmented whodunit, based upon the wrathful haziness of Susanna Moore’s suspense novel. Franny exists in a world of self-restraint, choosing imaginary sex over the real thing. Her promiscuous half sister Pauline (Jennifer Jason Leigh, “Hudsucker Proxy”) serves to highlight Franny’s inward sexuality even more so. Some of the film’s best scenes originate when Ryan and Leigh interact. When discussing marriage and sex, the two actresses seem to encapsulate their characters completely.

But when a psychotic killer leaves a “de-articulated” victim’s body part in Franny’s garden, she becomes involved in a life-threatening mystery. She meets the charmingly blunt Detective Malloy (Mark Ruffalo, “You Can Count On Me”), whose outspoken sexuality, and eventually the ambiguous possibility that he may be the murderer, seduces Franny. Franny thinks she saw the “de-articulator” the night of the murder, when she watched him “interact” with the victim-to-be, but this has some technical problems accompanying it. The audience is left to ponder how Franny could catch a tiny tattoo on the inside of the man’s wrist, but could not clearly make out his face. It’s a forced plot point that begins a confusing and weak plot development.

Unfortunately for Campion and Ryan, the film’s story severely limits what both want to do with “In the Cut.” Ryan comes out slightly ahead by giving a decent performance, but one more attuned with her character in Anthony Drazan’s “Hurlyburly” (1998) and farther removed from her romantic comedy protagonists. But there are times when Franny says she is drunk and acts like she has just swallowed a busload of sedatives, falling and slopping around the film, confusing both her character and the audience.

Campion falls into an even more difficult position. She stresses symbols of marriage and healthy relationships and then quickly diffuses them. She is telling you not to rely on wedding rings or baby carriages, that these become abject in the face of brutal reality. She illustrates this in the killer’s perversion of the wedding ring and his proposing to each girl before slicing and dicing. Campion is telling us not to fall prey to the imaginary world of fairy tale endings, but her “real” world of impending-doom New York seems just as fake.

The movie is also confused about many of its smaller characters. Kevin Bacon plays one of Franny’s ex-boyfriends. His neurotic stalker is well crafted, but just doesn’t know what his point is to the plot. Nick Damicic (“Fast Horses”) as Detective Malloy’s water gun-toting partner and Sharrief Pugh (“Trigger Happy”) as a student obsessed with proving John Wayne Gacy’s innocence through term papers splattered with blood are thrown into the mix with abandon. But the gargantuan leaps in continuity and logic really occur during pointless dream-like sequences of Franny’s father proposing to her mother and, unfortunately, the film’s entire ending.

While “In the Cut” tries to be more than a slasher flick (which it does with Franny’s acute attention to slang terms, Ruffalo’s performance and Campion’s beautifully-grotesque shot compositions), it becomes confused and contrived and sinks into its own self-made world of excessive human evil.

Grade: C