May (2002)The insensitivity and cruelty of others can make people feel worthless and insecure, and eventually give rise to dark thoughts. May (2002) is a horror movie about a young woman named May Canady (Angela Bettis), whose social awkwardness has kept her in relative isolation. Her sole companion is a doll named Suzie, who stares out at May from her glass display case with unblinking eyes. May espies a handsome mechanic named Adam Stubbs (Jeremy Sisto)--his hands in particular attract her attention--and she sets out to win his heart. Her idiosyncrasies prove too "weird" for Adam, shattering her heart of glass; heaven help those who step on the shards left behind.
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May is a horror movie at its core, but it could also be described as a romance--or an "anti-romance" to be accurate. May swoons over Adam and his "perfect hands", but lacks the social experience to approach him and express her interest. She follows him around town--from bistros to crosswalks--hoping that she might catch his eye. The bashful May offers him some of her detergent during a fateful encounter at the laundromat, and they strike up a stilted conversation, which she takes to mean that he is interested. May lacks the subtleties of flirting; her only exposure to it comes from Polly (Anna Faris), her co-worker at the veterinary clinic where she works--this is lost on May at first, since she is the recipient of Polly's attentions. It is puzzling why May fixates on Adam especially; he's handsome, yet it's his ordinary hands that captivate the slight redhead. May narrates while sitting on a bench at a bus stop that she seeks out people who are more than just desirable "parts", but a perfect "whole"--strange inner monologue that speaks to her proverbial toys in the attic. The film opens with a gory and harrowing image of May clutching her bleeding eye socket; this quickly transitions into a prologue about her childhood, where she was ostracized because she wore an eye patch to correct her lazy eye. May volunteers at a school for blind children, and takes a liking to a fellow outsider named Petey (Rachel David); it is implied that May chooses this place because she will not be "seen" as weird. Being seen is the same as existing in May's mind; she doesn't want to be seen as a "freak" anymore after having tasted (so-called) normal life during her brief romance with Adam--one that ends with him not just rejecting her, but ignoring her. The lingering question in May is about how May became the unusual woman she is. What little is shown from May's childhood concerns her controlling and obsessive mother (Merle Kennedy) trying to get her to cover her eye patch with her hair to make her look "normal". This is followed with May receiving Suzie from her mother, who she made to be her own "best friend" when she was little. May's mother is so fastidious that she calls the gift "ruined" because May doesn't tear away the gift wrap perfectly, and warns May to never take Suzie out of her case. This tiny scene illuminates where May got her compulsive behaviors and distorted perception of the world from, yet the rest of the movie never revisits this. May must have been terribly lonely growing up; she talks to Suzie as though she were alive, and the doll holds a kind of sway over her--as though it were the manifestation of her mother, controlling her even now.
May is considered an oddball by many characters in the film, yet she is surrounded by creeps and weirdos. Adam comes across as laid back, and has a fondness for gory horror movies. He shows May his playful student film about an amorous couple who engage in erotic cannibalism, which May interprets as "sweet". Her attempts to introduce elements from his movie into their foreplay does not go over well, and despite Adam's proclamations that he likes "weird", he moves onto a woefully normal gal named Hoop (Nora Zehetner)--as if to purge the experience of May from his psyche. Polly is a sociopath who uses May to sate her desires before dumping her pet cat on her when she's bored, turning to a leggy blonde tart named Ambrosia (Nichole Hiltz) instead. Even a punk rocker--credited as Blank (James Duval)--who May takes home because she likes his Frankenstein tattoo is excessively vicious to her after he makes a rightfully disturbing discovery in her freezer. The film is more sympathetic to its protagonist than the ostensible "regular" people who cross her path; they aren't just strange, they're mean--and despite her eventual segue into serial killing, May is somehow less so. May cracks from back-to-back rejections by Adam and Polly, and her fury is catalyzed by her murderous outburst toward Blank. She plans her revenge on the people who have wronged her, planning to get what she wanted out of them all along. She comes into her own during her spree, shedding her bashful exterior and brimming with confidence as she kills without remorse. May camouflages herself in the self-serving mannerisms of those around her like a predator, learning from their cruelty and turning it back on them--finally convinced that this is how the real world works. May has wanted to understand the world since childhood, though her exposure to it was tragically minimal. When she goes out on Halloween--the best time to cart a bloody cooler full of body parts without drawing attention--she dresses like her doll, Suzie. May has become the living doll her mother always intended for her to be; the murderous obsession with perfection and superficiality she attributed to Suzie possesses her and fills her with the calculating acumen to execute her dark mission.
May's obsession with the individual parts of people builds to a Grand Guignol-styled conclusion, one that embodies the mantra her mother shared with her when gifting her Suzie: "If you can't find a friend, make one." The disturbing Frankenstein's monster she stitches together is foreshadowed by Blank's tattoo and the off-hand comments she makes about everything from Ambrosia's "gams" to Polly's "lovely neck". This also follows a nightmarish scene where May makes the exceedingly poor decision to bring Suzie in her cracked glass case for show-and-tell at the blind children's school, resulting in her "friend" being broken apart. These scenes are a metaphor for how May has been "falling to pieces" during the course of her final breakdown. The cracking glass of Suzie's case--which May interprets as criticism--reflects her own sanity spider-webbing outward. May's psychotic break recalls that of Catherine Deneuve's highly introverted Carol from Roman Polanski's psychological horror film, Repulsion. Both characters let their grooming collapse in the throes of their madness; May shuffles around her apartment, covered in blood and cradling the corpse of her cat. Characters like Adam or Polly have the opportunity to intervene and help May through her obvious emotional crisis, yet they selfishly turn a blind eye instead. After Adam challenges her to "disgust him" out of playful flirtation, May shares a gruesome story about a botched operation on a dog. Her other eccentricities are less obvious, and some are even kind of cute, like how she sews patches into her clothes--giving her a Raggedy Ann look--or how she serves Gatorade in wine glasses. Adam continues to see her, willing to ignore her obviously unsettled emotional state because she has a nice body. May argues that people have an obligation to help our fellow human beings who are stricken with psychoses or are maladjusted from years of abuse--psychological or otherwise. It is because we do nothing that tragedies like the one May unleashes at the end are both inevitable and partly our fault.
Recommended for: Fans of a horror movie infused with romance and black comedy that explores how subjective our definitions of "normal" and "weird" are, and how they ultimately don't matter if you aren't sympathetic to the suffering of others. Lucky McGee's May doesn't fit neatly into the boundaries of a genre film; like its protagonist, it has a unique identity that flits between thought-provoking, light-hearted, and disturbing from scene to scene.
May is considered an oddball by many characters in the film, yet she is surrounded by creeps and weirdos. Adam comes across as laid back, and has a fondness for gory horror movies. He shows May his playful student film about an amorous couple who engage in erotic cannibalism, which May interprets as "sweet". Her attempts to introduce elements from his movie into their foreplay does not go over well, and despite Adam's proclamations that he likes "weird", he moves onto a woefully normal gal named Hoop (Nora Zehetner)--as if to purge the experience of May from his psyche. Polly is a sociopath who uses May to sate her desires before dumping her pet cat on her when she's bored, turning to a leggy blonde tart named Ambrosia (Nichole Hiltz) instead. Even a punk rocker--credited as Blank (James Duval)--who May takes home because she likes his Frankenstein tattoo is excessively vicious to her after he makes a rightfully disturbing discovery in her freezer. The film is more sympathetic to its protagonist than the ostensible "regular" people who cross her path; they aren't just strange, they're mean--and despite her eventual segue into serial killing, May is somehow less so. May cracks from back-to-back rejections by Adam and Polly, and her fury is catalyzed by her murderous outburst toward Blank. She plans her revenge on the people who have wronged her, planning to get what she wanted out of them all along. She comes into her own during her spree, shedding her bashful exterior and brimming with confidence as she kills without remorse. May camouflages herself in the self-serving mannerisms of those around her like a predator, learning from their cruelty and turning it back on them--finally convinced that this is how the real world works. May has wanted to understand the world since childhood, though her exposure to it was tragically minimal. When she goes out on Halloween--the best time to cart a bloody cooler full of body parts without drawing attention--she dresses like her doll, Suzie. May has become the living doll her mother always intended for her to be; the murderous obsession with perfection and superficiality she attributed to Suzie possesses her and fills her with the calculating acumen to execute her dark mission.
May's obsession with the individual parts of people builds to a Grand Guignol-styled conclusion, one that embodies the mantra her mother shared with her when gifting her Suzie: "If you can't find a friend, make one." The disturbing Frankenstein's monster she stitches together is foreshadowed by Blank's tattoo and the off-hand comments she makes about everything from Ambrosia's "gams" to Polly's "lovely neck". This also follows a nightmarish scene where May makes the exceedingly poor decision to bring Suzie in her cracked glass case for show-and-tell at the blind children's school, resulting in her "friend" being broken apart. These scenes are a metaphor for how May has been "falling to pieces" during the course of her final breakdown. The cracking glass of Suzie's case--which May interprets as criticism--reflects her own sanity spider-webbing outward. May's psychotic break recalls that of Catherine Deneuve's highly introverted Carol from Roman Polanski's psychological horror film, Repulsion. Both characters let their grooming collapse in the throes of their madness; May shuffles around her apartment, covered in blood and cradling the corpse of her cat. Characters like Adam or Polly have the opportunity to intervene and help May through her obvious emotional crisis, yet they selfishly turn a blind eye instead. After Adam challenges her to "disgust him" out of playful flirtation, May shares a gruesome story about a botched operation on a dog. Her other eccentricities are less obvious, and some are even kind of cute, like how she sews patches into her clothes--giving her a Raggedy Ann look--or how she serves Gatorade in wine glasses. Adam continues to see her, willing to ignore her obviously unsettled emotional state because she has a nice body. May argues that people have an obligation to help our fellow human beings who are stricken with psychoses or are maladjusted from years of abuse--psychological or otherwise. It is because we do nothing that tragedies like the one May unleashes at the end are both inevitable and partly our fault.
Recommended for: Fans of a horror movie infused with romance and black comedy that explores how subjective our definitions of "normal" and "weird" are, and how they ultimately don't matter if you aren't sympathetic to the suffering of others. Lucky McGee's May doesn't fit neatly into the boundaries of a genre film; like its protagonist, it has a unique identity that flits between thought-provoking, light-hearted, and disturbing from scene to scene.