MAY

May is a lonely and introverted girl, she works as a veterinary assistant in a small clinic, she enjoys sewing and has a special relationship with Lucy, a porcelain doll that her mother gave her when she was a child. One day, May falls in love with Adam, a boy she often meets at the laundromat and starts a relationship with him, but the slightly eccentric attitudes of the girl make Adam distance himself from her. At this point, May begins to reciprocate the homosexual attentions of her colleague Polly, who however soon shows that she is only interested in an adventure. The already fragile mental balance of May begins to break and the girl, tired of her perpetual condition of loneliness, decides to make herself a friend with needle, thread, and human limbs. Lucky McKee's cinematic debut is one of those electrifying ones that are increasingly rarely encountered in recent horror cinema. The young American director, who will later continue to follow a very personal poetic of female solitude, begins his career exploring the depths of the mind of a young misfit who does everything to be accepted by the world around her, with no positive results except through "unorthodox" practices. The sensitivity, the bitter irony, the incredible psychological characterization of the protagonist make "May" a gem of contemporary horror. But speaking of horror tout court is reductive when referring to "May", since first and foremost McKee's film is a psychological drama that often contaminates itself with the light tones of comedy, an orderly mix of genres that helps to underline the cinematic functionality in the narration of a wounded, sensitive, and irretrievably schizophrenic ego. Thus, as is traditional in freak cinema, in "May" the point of view is that of the monster, a human monster, for whom one tends to take sides and with whom it is impossible not to identify. After all, isn't there a little bit of "May" in each of us? An introverted girl ostracized by the community simply for her desire for affection expressed in an eccentric way, which is nothing more than the result of the abandonment suffered by the girl since childhood for a simple physical anomaly (a lazy eye) that made her a special child and therefore prone to isolation. A life as a victim that suddenly turns into a life as a perpetrator, a new Frankenstein who, in the elegant splatter delirium finale, gives a diabolical aura to the character while preserving the tone of delicate search for affection that runs through the entire film. May is one of those characters for whom it is very easy to feel empathy, a loser in a world of mediocrities who only finds her dimension through a regression into introspection. It is no coincidence that May's best friend is Lucy, a doll that "lives" in a glass case, a clear alter ego of the protagonist, emotionally fragile like porcelain and isolated from the outside world. As May's mental balance cracks, Lucy's case shows cracks: the two simulacra of resentment and anger shatter in the dimension of horror where the human being and the doll end up coinciding completely in the macabre and grotesque puppet of flesh and fabric that represents May's true final friend, the only one capable of gently touching her face in a gesture of sincere love. It is Amy, who is not coincidentally an anagram of May, the final twist that gives a touch of surrealism to the film with a bitterly happy ending disguised as a happy ending. Bringing May to life is the excellent Angela Bettis ("La Casa dei Massacri", "Carrie"), McKee's fetish actress (she will return in the episode of "Masters of Horror" directed by him, "Sick Girl") capable of portraying such a strange and sui generis character with naturalness, ease, and humanity. The rest of the cast is made up of a brilliant post- "Scary Movie" Anna Faris and a somewhat monotonous Jeremy Sisto ("Wrong Turn"; "436 - The Prophecy"). "May" is a particular and pleasant horror film that is absolutely worth recovering, an intelligent and well-acted intimate horror film that has been unjustly undervalued by the domestic distribution.