May is a disturbing film full of weirdos but almost none of them is the real deal, apart from the central character of May herself. In a world where people play-act at being strange to make themselves seem interesting, May is properly odd.
Lucky McKee’s solo debut came out in 2002, to a little acclaim, but has become a cult over the years, loved by people who admire its aslant world view, its focus on its lead character and its position on pseuds who make false claims on weirdness.
May was born with a lazy eye and has been brought up cosseted by her mother. She grew up – or rather didn’t grow up – in a world that didn’t know how to take her. So she kept herself to herself, a child in many respects, stuck in a sort of retarded development, just like the funny doll May has in a glass box in her room and which she talks to when the going gets tough.
Finding life isn’t the bowl of cherries she maybe hoped, one day May decides to play the game everyone else is playing. She disguises the wall-eye with a contact lens. No longer being shunned, into the world May sails.
May has a job as a vet’s nurse and gets all the yukky tasks because she’s OK doing them. Her colleague Polly (Anna Faris), a slinky minx, has a crush on her. Away from work, May tries to get herself a boyfriend by staring hard at a tasty young man called Adam (Jeremy Sisto). When that doesn’t work she decides to approach him directly. What with May being pretty and her eye no longer staring directly at the side of her nose the whole time, that does work.
A horror nut, Adam’s room is full of the sort of stuff a trainee psycho might collect. There are pictures of people in extremis hanging on the walls. Convinced of his own out-thereness, Adam expresses himself by making little horror films. He shows one to May. It’s about people who make love by eating each other. The next time May and Adam get down to it, she takes a big bite out of Adam’s lip.
Dumped, May turns to Polly, another self-styled oddball who’s worlds away from being the real thing. A tender relationship develops, until Polly realises what she’s dealing with at least.
May also starts volunteering at a centre for blind kids. That’s not going to go well either. Then there’s Blank (James Duval), the punk with his hair all glued up into a hairstyle. Another of society’s self-styled outsiders. Who freaks out completely when he sees what’s in May’s fridge.
McKee keeps the pot bubbling, cycling May through one relationship after another, everything culminating in a gory climax on Halloween. The night when the normals allow themselves to be weird provides cover for spectacular ghoulishness. Dolls are involved. I’ll say no more.
There is Dario Argento in here, explicitly at one point, and it helps that the actor playing May, Angela Bettis, has something of Emma Stone about her. Bettis played Carrie in a TV remake of the 1976 movie. Which is about right.
May can be squeezed into the same late-90s, early noughties box of functional weirdness as Napoleon Dynamite et al, just about. But it’s more comfortable alongside something like Ginger Snaps, which came out a couple of years earlier. A story about a woman who becomes a werewolf every time she has her period, it puts the audience firmly onside with its lead character, just like May does. Though in May there’s also the whole notion of authenticity – a good thing?
While we’re chewing on that, in the interim May looks like a freak and acts like a freak. But she is our freak and that’s what makes this fascinating outlier significantly different from the usual run of horror films.
May – Watch it/buy it at Amazon
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© Steve Morrissey 2026
