May- Horror Movie Review- (Day 11 of 31)- October Massacre

Last Updated on August 2, 2021

PLOT: When a socially awkward young woman finally makes an attempt at romance, the rejection she receives sends her into a murderous tailspin.

REVIEW:  MAY is a very difficult film to watch. It is an excruciatingly close-up examination of an already unstable woman’s descent into total psychopathy. May was born with two strikes against her: a lazy eye, which put her at a social remove from her peers, inhibiting her ability to make friends; and a clenched butthole of a mother, who undermined May’s self-esteem and independence at every turn. She also gave May a doll. She is instructed to never remove it from its glass-fronted cabinet, and the doll becomes the only friend she has throughout her life. The static face and silent, staring eyes provide counterpoint to May’s fluttering nervousness, and the slowly cracking glass is a visual metaphor for her unraveling psyche.

After several fumbling attempts at love and friendship – at normalcy – end in rejection and revulsion, the glass shatters and falls away and May’s darkness is finally unbound. In her perfection of rage, she stabilizes through violence. On Halloween night, she enters a killing spree that is the only time in her life she has felt confident and in control. Gone is the painfully awkward, weird girl who blurts her strange thoughts. Her costume is equanimity and blood. She finally accepts her alien nature, and inhabits it fully. She saunters and quips as she kills, collecting body parts for the film’s harrowing and horrifying conclusion.

The anxiety writer/director Lucky McKee mined for MAY is slightly autobiographical (he too wore an eyepatch as a youth, to correct a lazy eye), which helps the film have a personal feel, but those anxieties are also archetypal: unless you’re some super-confident robot, you’ve at some time felt unwanted, out of place, self-conscious, and humiliated by a social blunder. You will live out every single one of those moments through this film, mostly due to the amazing acting of Angela Bettis in the titular role. She’s in every scene, and her performance is basically an acting class for anyone needing to portray neurosis, innocence, desire, and inner rage all at the same time.

BEST TNA SCENE: There is no TNA, per se, but there is an intriguing lesbian scene between Angela Bettis and Anna Faris.

BEST GORE BIT:  I’m particularly fond of the scene where May stabs a girl in the head, who happens to be drinking from a carton of milk. The carton hits the ground, and the flowing milk swirls together with the pooling blood. It’s beautiful imagery of a horrible act.

HALLOWEEN DRINKING GAME:  Every time you have to hide your face because May’s social anxiety and fumbling interactions with other people remind you of your own near crippling inability to relate to the people around you, take a shot. Oh, it’s just me? Whoops.

GET THE DVD HERE!

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