Review By Paul Mount, 4 out of 5 What the..? Now this one is seriously weird. Straight-to-video horror ain? usually my thing but MAY came highly recommended from various sources and?ell, a review copy? a review copy, right? I didn? expect much and I certainly didn? expect this creepy, gory little horror thriller expertly directed by Lucy McKee with a disturbing central performnance by newcomer Bettis. I also didn? expect a film which will live with me far longer than more recent traditional genre fare like WRONG TURN or CABIN FEVER. MAY is actually quite disturbing.
It all starts innocuously enough. May Kennedy (Bettis) is an odd child with a lazy eye. Contact lenses help rectify the condition but cruel kids have made her a bit self-conscious. It hardly helps when Mom gives her a creepy doll in a glass case and tells her the one thing she can? do is take it out of the case. Cut to several years later and May is a socially-awkward young woman working as a veterinary assistant. She? starved of human contact and desperate to make friends. Hunky mechanic Adam (Sisto) takes her fancy and she engineers a chance encounter with him which leads to an awful first date and a blossoming relationship. But when they start to get intimate May bites his lip and draws blood. Adam? spooked and he starts to put distance between himself and this strange girl. But May? not to be spurned to easily. If she can? make friends the normal way, she decides to make a friend all of her own?hich is where the fun and the blood-letting starts.
Creepy? Undoubtedly. McKee – who wrote and directed – has crafted a sometimes-amusing, always-edgy modern fable about disenfranchised youth and obsession. May is clearly one sandwich short of a picnic but whose fault is it? Society, as we all know, likes to distance itself from people who are different from the rest of us – so who? to blame when they go off the mental rails and start doing seriously crazy things? Who knows? Maybe if someone – her family, her so-called friends – had reached out and tried to understand her, May wouldn? have been so inclined to stick her cat? corpse in the freezer or cut her friend Polly? (Faris) face off? MAY is edgy stuff from the outset. May herself is like a timebomb, ready to go off at the point when we sense she?l have had enough. We laugh nervously at her sad attempts to be normal – to hold down a job, to find herself a boyfriend. But we wince when she says or does the wrong thing, we shiver at her strange relationship with that damned doll. The horror comes thick and fast towards the end of the film but perhaps the most disturbing sequence occurs when May drops the doll and its glass case shatters when she shows her ?riend?to a class full of blind children.
I? not sure I? really categorise MAY as a horror film per se. The bad guys in horror movies are usually just that – monsters, evil creatures, supernatural beings. May is just a person, lost, confused and inadequate. Despite the terrible things she? driven to do in her quest for acceptance, it? had not to feel a moment of sympathy when she finally makes a friend?
THE DISC: Clean, muted picture, tonally in keeping with the style of the film. Criminally there are no extras apart from the trailer. This is a shame; I? love to have seen a behind-the-scenes feature and I? even have found time to listen to a McKee commentary. Now we may never know what makes someone create a film like MAY?
