If you cant find a friend, make one. A sweet, sad, and utterly bizarre tale from writer/director Lucky McGhee, May features its titular character attempting to engage with an outside world shes felt alienated from since childhood. Awkward and lonely, Mays only friend is a doll named Suzie, encased in glass, given to her by her mother. As she tries to establish connections friends and lovers without the proper tools to do so, May is let down over and over by the inadequacies of others, and when Suzie is bloodied and assaulted, May finally decides to make a real friend of her own in her own way. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=es0HnQqCqg0 Darkly funny and deeply touching, May is a heartwarming character study with a batcrap-crazy horror movie lurking in and around the narrative: a road trip through beautiful, uncharted country which constantly threatens to veer off into a ravine. Whats really odd about this film is that McGhees twisted central character played with humanising, gauche tenderness by Angela Bettis isnt the villain in a horror movie, although she does cannibalise dead people for spare parts. Shes not a serial killer, although she does murder a whole lot of people. Shes not psychotic, although shes damaged, with a traumatising past. Shes just a girl trying to connect with someone, a person in need of a real friend, real love: someone to be with. The people around her arent the villains, either this isnt some hapless Burtonesque fairy tale where the monster is the hero and the villagers the bad guys. Theyre just ordinary people people with some eccentricities, but people nonetheless. They dont deserve what happens to them, for the most part (neither does poor Lupe the cat) but the films not about them. They cant be the friends that May needs, but shes got a use for them, regardless. After all, theyve got good things about them. May knows that. The final scene, in which May makes a real friend, would come across as ridiculous, even cringeworthy in another film but McGhees earned the moment with the preceding ninety minutes of careful, masterful filmmaking, and rather than inspiring laughter, it makes you smile instead.
Professional writer, punk werewolf and nesting place for starfish. Obsessed with squid, spirals and story. I publish short weird fiction online at desincarne.com, and tweet nonsense under the name Jack The Bodiless. You can follow me all you like, just don't touch my stuff.
