There are cult classics, and then there’s May—a film so gloriously weird, sad, funny, and horrifying that it’s like Frankenstein’s monster stitched together from awkward first dates, lonely childhoods, and a vat of stage blood. Written and directed by Lucky McKee in his feature debut, May bombed at the box office but has since crawled back from the cinematic graveyard with all the scrappy charm of its title character’s patchwork “friend.”
This isn’t just a horror movie. It’s a love letter to loneliness, an ode to outcasts, and a cautionary tale about what happens when you tell a child, “If you can’t find a friend, make one.” Because sometimes kids take that literally.
Angela Bettis: Queen of the Uncomfortable
First, let’s get this out of the way: Angela Bettis carries May on her bony, awkward shoulders like Atlas lugging the world. Her performance is equal parts fragile, funny, creepy, and devastating. She doesn’t play May Dove Canady as “a weirdo” in the horror-movie sense—she plays her as a painfully real, socially stunted human being. Watching her is like staring into the eyes of every lonely kid who ate lunch alone in high school… except this kid grows up, works in a vet clinic, and keeps a glass-encased doll named Suzie as her best friend.
Bettis makes May’s longing so raw it’s funny and tragic at the same time. You laugh when she nervously tells Adam she likes his hands. You cringe when she bites his lip until it bleeds. And you cry-laugh when she yells at her doll like it just canceled their brunch plans.
If this movie had tanked entirely, Bettis would still walk away a legend.
Dating, But Make It Horror
The plot is deceptively simple: May wants connection. She thinks she finds it in Adam (Jeremy Sisto, playing the kind of smug artsy dude who makes student films about lovers cannibalizing each other). May is drawn to his hands—literally, just his hands—and he’s charmed by her awkwardness. For a while, you almost believe it might work out.
Then comes the lip bite.
Adam, who was fine showing her his short film about two lovers eating each other alive, suddenly acts shocked when she goes a little Hannibal Lecter during a makeout session. The hypocrisy is hilarious. Sorry, Adam, you can screen your gross cannibal project, but the second she gets blood on your chin, she’s “crazy”? Please.
When that relationship burns, May rebounds with Polly (Anna Faris), a bubbly lesbian coworker who looks at May’s awkwardness and thinks, “Yes, that’s hot.” The chemistry is weirdly great, but it fizzles when Polly turns out to be as unfaithful as she is cheerful. May’s heartbreak at finding Polly with Ambrosia (Nichole Hiltz) is the kind of scene where you want to scream: “For the love of god, someone just hug this poor girl before she starts sewing people together.”
Spoiler: nobody hugs her.
When Your Doll Is Your Therapist
The movie’s true villain isn’t May’s lazy eye or her bad dating luck. It’s Suzie, the creepy doll in the glass case. From childhood, Suzie is May’s confidante, the one constant in her life, and also the worst life coach imaginable. Whenever May spirals, she runs to Suzie. And when Suzie’s case is destroyed by a pack of blind kids (yes, this movie has blind kids shattering dolls—deal with it), May’s fragile mental state snaps harder than a breadstick at Olive Garden.
Suzie doesn’t talk out loud, but her silent judgment pushes May over the edge. If Chucky is the loud, stabby kind of doll, Suzie is the passive-aggressive one that ruins your self-esteem and then watches silently as you self-destruct.
Kill Your Cat, Kill Your Friends, Kill Your Reputation
After losing Adam, Polly, and Suzie, May spirals into violence. First stop: poor Loopy the cat, who learns the hard way that ignoring May’s affection gets you an ashtray to the skull. Loopy’s death is brutal, not because it’s graphic, but because it feels like May finally crossed the Rubicon from “sad girl” to “scary girl.”
From there, things escalate fast. May starts collecting body parts like she’s shopping at a macabre Build-A-Bear. Polly’s neck, Adam’s hands, Ambrosia’s legs, a punk’s tattooed arms—all stitched into her new “best friend,” Amy. The sequence is grotesque, but also kind of funny, because May approaches murder with the same nervous energy she brought to flirting. She’s still awkward, still vulnerable, but now she has a scalpel.
Watching May slaughter her way through Halloween night while dressed as Suzie is like watching the prom scene in Carrie—if Carrie had also moonlighted as a seamstress. It’s horrifying, yes, but it’s also a cathartic release. The shy, bullied girl is finally in control, even if she has to cut up everyone she ever cared about to get there.
Amy, The Perfect Friend
The pièce de résistance is Amy, May’s patchwork human doll. It’s grotesque, stitched together from corpses, topped with cat fur, and missing one vital feature: eyes. The solution? May digs out her own lazy eye and pops it in, bleeding out as she screams for Amy to “see” her.
And then—the miracle. Amy moves. Amy caresses her. Amy validates her.
Is it real? Is it a dying hallucination? Who cares? For May, it’s the happiest ending she could imagine. For us, it’s the punchline to the darkest romantic comedy ever written. Girl meets boy, boy rejects girl, girl makes new friend out of corpses. Roll credits.
Why It Works
Here’s the genius of May: it’s funny, tragic, and horrifying all at once. It’s Frankenstein meets Carrie meets Napoleon Dynamite. Lucky McKee’s direction embraces awkward silences, lingering close-ups, and sudden bursts of gore. One minute you’re giggling at May awkwardly complimenting someone’s neck; the next, you’re gagging as she stabs a punk in the head with scissors.
And unlike most horror flicks, the real terror isn’t supernatural. It’s loneliness. It’s rejection. It’s the slow grind of being invisible until one day you decide to make sure people remember you—by turning them into a quilt.
Dark Humor Takeaway
The scariest thing about May isn’t the gore—it’s how relatable it is. Who among us hasn’t wanted to stitch together the best qualities of everyone we’ve ever loved into one perfect partner? Okay, maybe not literally. But metaphorically? Absolutely. May just takes that universal desire and cranks it up to eleven, with a sewing kit and a freezer full of cat fur.
Final Verdict
May is one of those rare horror films that makes you laugh, wince, and genuinely feel something for its monster. Angela Bettis gives a performance that’s iconic, heartbreaking, and unsettling all at once. It’s not a movie about ghosts or demons—it’s about the monster we create when kindness is denied too many times.
In other words: if you can’t find a friend, make one. Just… maybe not like this.
