May (2002)
October 13, 2022
Synopsis
"What if Doctor Frankenstein was the cringiest early-00s girl imaginable?" is the question boldly asked by May, a movie I put off watching for years. May is a desperately lonely weirdo trying her best to find someone to spend her life with. When she strikes up a tentative friendship with Adam, a handsome mechanic with a taste for the unusual, things seem to be changing for the better.
The soundtrack
Baller.
The characters and story
Mostly good. Polly, May’s coworker, is...odd. All the writing around her is very strange, even by the standards of the rest of the movie. She genuinely seems like an alien who’s dropped into the movie to research humanity solely through sex. By itself that’s cool, but she’s also predatory and gross. It could be something of an inversion: that the lesbian is slamming ass all over town has very 2002 energy.
Adam is a Pitch-perfect Guy Who’s A Little Odd But Doesn’t Know What To Do With A True Oddity. He wants a weird girlfriend who likes horror movies but doesn’t want a weird girlfriend who’s waaaayyy too into his student horror film. Like most people he lacks the uncomfortable amount of honesty needed to completely end things with May (though it’s debatable whether she would even accept a 100% unflinchingly honest breakup) and just wants her to take the hint and move on already.
Angela Bettis is exquisitely unsettling as our titular character. She channels so many of the awkward girls I knew in high school (myself included), almost too perfectly. She’s painfully isolated and has never had a real friend or romantic relationship. Her sexual experience is almost non-existent and when she does finally have sex it’s with someone who lacks any genuine affection for her. Every time she feels a connection to someone, they pull away as soon as she shows the real May. She is so desperately and profoundly alone that you can’t help but feel sorry for her, and celebrate when she finally takes her mother’s advice truly to heart: if you can’t find friends, make friends.
The story
If I have one complaint it’s that it feels like part of the movie is missing, and I can’t decide if it was a good choice or not. Her childhood is shown so briefly; just enough to explain most of why she turns out the way she does, but at such a bare minimum that it’s almost annoying.
On the other hand, I’m almost certain that if May were released today it would be over two hours long and feature so much of her childhood that it would neuter the ending. That said, its runtime is only 93 minutes so an extra minute or two could have gone a long way if only because May is so extremely weird that it feels like we’re still missing some context. I’m choosing to believe that it was an intentional choice to avoid getting bogged down by backstory and exposition, and to its credit, the brief glimpse of her childhood does a lot of heavy lifting for her character. Her lazy eye and awkwardness surrounding it is a clever way to quickly tell your audience that she very literally has a much different perspective on life and can’t seem to reconcile her view of the world with that of her peers.
The big problem
I’m sick of seeing cats getting brutally killed in horror movies, and unfortunately May not only kills a cat but keeps showing it and mentioning it. I don’t have anything else to say here. It’s bad and it sucks and I really wish horror writers and directors could at least kill some different animals. I’d say I want to chart out the percentage of horror movie animal deaths occupied by cats but...you know, I don’t actually want to do that.
Closing thoughts
Unnecessary pet murder aside, it’s a great movie. The ending is a little wonky and it feels a little lopsided, but it’s a wild, uncomfortable journey. I avoided watching it for years because at some point I heard it was “weird,” and that’s it. Just further proof that other people’s opinions are pretty much useless.
Content warnings
Animal death.