- Writer, director:
- Lucky McKee.
- Cast:
- Angela Bettis, Jeremy Sisto, Anna Faris.
Canady girls start training for a life of piracy at an early age.
May Dove Canady (Angela Bettis) had an isolated childhood with only one real friend: Suzy, a doll in glass case. As her mother told her, “If you can’t find a friend, make one.” She works in a veterinary hospital with Polly (Anna Faris), who seems attracted to May but makes fun of her weirdness. Then one day she meets Adam (Jeremy Sisto), a mechanic who claims to “like weird.”
All May really wants is to fit in, to connect to someone, but the more she tries, the more put off people are by her; it’s ironic that she’s most conventionally attractive once she stops pretending to be “normal” and just turns all the crazy dials to eleven (the oddly anachronistic slang is a touch of genius, by the way).
May is very pretty and very disturbing. It builds slowly toward the final act, with a sort of inevitability, a terrible logic. Definitely one of the best horror films so far this century. Though, for two thirds of the film, it isn’t really horror at all, just an oddly beautiful love story. The final act isn’t quite as good as the opening two-thirds, but it’s still an amazing film. Angela Bettis does an amazing job, as do Jeremy Sisto and Anna Faris (whom, the latter, I’d only seen in the Scary movies before, so I was pleasantly surprised), and Lucky McKee displays an undeniable skill as a writer and director. Deserves a much wider audience than it got.
