msic

This film was an extremely pleasant surprise, although the experience of watching it was often anything but pleasant. MAY takes some basic tropes of horror *and* camp cinema -- the misfit, the overbearing parents, the failed socialization, the fetishization -- and invests them with fresh, bold ideas. Just when McKee threatens to go over the top, and slip into snarky, self-satisfied campiness, he and actress Angela Bettis pull back, revealing the pathos of not fitting in. Here's a psychopath we can all relate to.

I hesitate to mention this, lest anyone think this film is anything less than solid entertainment, but there's a level of theoretical sophistication at work in MAY as well. Typically, our pop-Freud notion of psychoanalysis leads us to reduce individuals to a simple, one-note diagnosis. "He's anal," "she's paranoid," etc. MAY -- both the film and the character -- is a more complex case. The film lights on various key concepts from Freud and Lacan, without ever announcing themselves as such. Fetishism, the uncanny, the "errant" female refusal to accept castration, the scopophilic drive -- it's all there, but never cartoonish and never simplified. So what we get is a beautiful, well-rounded psycho who never has a chance in the outside world. And this is truly heartbreaking, instead of being merely risible.

But again, I emphasize. This film is *not* some sort of filmic demonstration of psychoanalytic theses. It's too smart for that. The full complexity of MAY is only visible in retrospect, right around the time you're picking your jaw up off the floor.

I had just about given up on US "indie" cinema. Lucky for us that McKee came along. Don't miss this excellent modern horror fable.