IT is a shock to find perennially blonde Meg Ryan turned chestnut brown, even more so to see her in the buff for the first time.

Every so often, and not with success until now, Little Miss Romantic Comedy has tried to nutMeg us with a downbeat role, most memorably as an alcoholic in Addicted To Love. The night after her cute Doris Day job.

Ryan, the one-time journalism student turned bane of journalists with her obtuse interviews, is a serious artist. She is also commercial toast, with no box-office hit since 1998's You've Got Mail.

Time, at 41, for a new challenge and who better to take her on that journey than New Zealander Jane Campion, feminist director of An Angel At My Table, The Piano and Holy Smoke.

In The Cut's exploration of female sexuality is as audacious as you would expect from Campion, but casts Ryan in a newly dark light that is surprising, rewarding and revealing in more ways than one.

She plays the self-contained, bespectacled Frannie Thorstin, a New York writing professor who becomes embroiled in a murder investigation in her neighbourhood when she engages in an erotic affair with Detective Gio Molloy (Mark Ruffalo), the American-Italian homicide cop assigned to the case. The same Molloy she thinks she saw being 'entertained' the day before in a bar cubicle by the now dead woman.

Frannie's desire is of the fearful, exploratory kind rather than an enjoyable release. As she sinks into the quicksand of passion - in a more hands-on manner than Tom Cruise in Stanley Kubrick's Eyes Wide Shut - she grows ever more suspicious of every man's motives, querying her own too.

In The Cut has been billed elsewhere as an erotic thriller, and certainly Ryan and Ruffalo's scenes have an erotic charge stripped off all romance, echoing Vendredi Soir earlier this year. However, as the murder mystery bubbles away, Campion and co-writer Susanna Moore (who wrote the source novel) are more interested in a feminist agenda, not least Frannie's fearless relationship with her damaged-goods half-sister (Jennifer Jason Leigh).

This is seriously adult film-making, a re-birth for Ryan and another champion from Campion.

Updated: 09:39 Friday, October 31, 2003