May
I normally won't go out of my way to review films I've seen before but this is one of my favorites, without question. May doesn’t just portray loneliness, it suffocates you with it, lets it crawl under your skin and rot there. Not horror in the jump-scare sense, but horror in the way it shows the quiet, aching devastation of being unseen.
From the boxed doll May was never allowed to touch, to her obsessive fixation on Adam’s hands, the film is a patchwork of fragile, fleeting connections. Those hands aren’t just hands, they’re everything she’s been denied: warmth, tenderness, intimacy. When Adam shakes her hand in the laundromat, it isn’t casual. For May, it’s seismic. It’s love, or at least the closest thing to it she’s ever felt.
The film nails the psychology of isolation with rare precision. When you’ve been alone for too long, the smallest gestures, a glance, a hug, a touch, become monumental. You cling to them like oxygen because you know how quickly they’ll disappear, and when they do, it feels like a limb has been severed. That’s what makes May’s descent so tragic. She’s not hunting for perfection. She’s scavenging for scraps of affection, trying to piece together something whole from what the world refuses to give her.
Her relationship with Polly is one of the film’s most honest threads. It’s not about male gaze or shock value like it's easy to assume (especially with Anna Faris' track record) it’s about desperation. Loneliness pushes you into strange, uncomfortable places; sometimes you say yes not because it feels right, but because silence is worse. Whether it’s Polly, her doll, or the animals she tends to, everything May touches is a plea to be seen, to be enough.
Angela Bettis is perfect, she doesn’t just play May, she is May. There’s no caricature of “weirdness” here, just a fragile, awkward, yearning presence that’s both heartbreaking and unsettling. Lucky McKee’s direction frames her world like a fractured mirror. Part indie quirk, part tragedy, part slow-burning horror. Every lingering shot feels like it’s daring you to look deeper, to sit with her discomfort.
By the time the final act arrives, it feels inevitable. The last moments are raw, tender, and horrifying all at once. A final exhale from a character who just wanted to be held together, even if she had to stitch herself into existence.
May isn’t just horror, it’s a love letter to the lonely and broken. A beautifully haunting Frankenstein stitched together from heartbreak and yearning. I could go on, but I’ll leave it there.