May

"So many pretty parts. No pretty wholes.”

MAY is one of the greats of the 21st century and a hell of a directorial debut by Lucky McKee. Angela Bettis gives a performance for the ages as the title character, May Dove Canady, a lonely young woman working as a veterinarian's assistant, whose only friend in her life is a doll encased in glass that her mother gave her as a child. Even that is out of her reach.

As the doll's case begins to crack, so does May. She wants to reach out to people, she wants to connect with others and make a friend, but she fixates on individual parts of people and ultimately finds everyone too disappointing, so she sets out to begin assembling her perfect companion out of the parts of others.

This movie is a study of loneliness and how desperate a person can be for companionship when it is always just out of their reach, it is deeply about that ongoing struggle for human connection. What I particularly love is that May never really considers changing herself for others. She is who she wants to be and simply wants others to accept that, and that's what she can never seem to find.

At the same time, she cannot accept anyone else. And it’s not simply that she can’t accept the parts of others that she doesn’t like, can’t accept their faults, because this film is so beyond that kind of normalcy. She literally can’t connect with people beyond the parts of their bodies she fixates on. Yes, there are people that she is much too weird for, and that push her away or ignore her. But there are also people who do want to be around her, and she still cannot connect with the entire individual, that’s the wall she keeps running into. That’s why she needs to “make a friend’ in the first place.

MAY is one part female slasher, one part extremely inventive FRANKENSTEIN story. All that, plus a *wild* early appearance by Anna Faris.