In the Cut is a 2003 American psychological thriller film written and directed by Jane Campion and starring Meg Ryan, Mark Ruffalo, Jennifer Jason Leigh and Kevin Bacon. Campion's screenplay is an adaptation of the 1995 novel of the same name by Susanna Moore. The film focuses on an English teacher who becomes personally entangled with a detective investigating a series of gruesome murders in her Manhattan neighborhood.

Plot

Frannie Avery, an introverted writer and English teacher in New York City, meets one of her students, Cornelius, at a local pub to talk about coursework. Cornelius proposes a theory that John Wayne Gacy may not have been guilty of his crimes, later suggesting that 'desire' was responsible. On her way to the basement bathroom, she witnesses a woman performing oral sex on a man. Though it's dark, she can see a 3 of spades tattoo on the man's wrist and the woman's blue fingernails.