The Twenty-Fifth Night of Halloween: May

ON THE TWENTY-FIFTH NIGHT OF HALLOWEEN … I watched May (2002), by Lucky McKee. May is a disturbed young woman. As a child, her body-image obsessed mother gave her a creepy doll that she was forbidden to touch. A decade later, this doll is still May’s only friend. She lives alone and has never had a romantic partner. She decides to rectify her sad state by pursuing a young man with perfect hands. Many missteps later, she is rejected by him as well as two other love interests. The resulting spiral of desperation inspires her to embark on a new quest: slice off all the good parts of her would-be lovers and stitch them together to make herself a new doll friend.    

Can something be so awkward that it becomes horrifying? That’s the question this movie seems to be groping toward, consciously or unconsciously. Horror in the traditional sense doesn’t begin until over an hour into May. Instead, it's predominantly a character study about an extremely awkward individual's wrong turns in her search for love. For a character study, though, it's cartoonishly unnaturalistic, with either exaggerated or wildly incongruous dialog and behavior. A beautiful female coworker who is attracted to May has exactly one note: regardless of the situation, she is always horny and indiscriminately down for the “kinky” stuff. The handsome film student May is infatuated with from afar does not even notice her when she is preening for him two feet away, but when at last he does look up after physically colliding with her, he is instantly charmed. Blind students who are curious about the doll in May’s case accidentally break the glass and then excitedly reach for the doll as if they have no idea that glass can cut skin. Many other moments like this suggest that the movie itself has as poor a grasp on human psychology as May does—but this might be intentional. It could be that we are seeing the world as the socially clueless and mentally broken May sees it, and the awkwardness of the filmmaking is supposed to amplify May’s awkwardness. It certainly is excruciatingly awkward, and that very may well be a form of horror. Another possibility is that the film is operating under the punk ethos of making technical incompetence a virtue. That only works for me, though, when the filmmaker has an energetic lack of self-awareness, as in such gloriously inept works as Blood Feast (1963) or Alien Contamination (1980). May simply doesn’t make enough insane choices for the incompetence to become charming. But again, it is intensely awkward. And as a bonus, it features good use of music by one of my favorite 90’s bands, The Breeders.