MAY – There’s a scene where May stands in a shower cubicle, holding what looks like the showerhead but is in fact a phone. She tells the voice of her doll to shut up – apparently it does, not that we can hear it – she says “thanks.” Later, the camera cuts away to the bottom of the shower, where a cat lies dead. The weird alchemy of that sequence sums up everything I like about ‘May’. Here’s another – blind kids crawl across broken glass in a scene that can’t fail to summon feelings of panic. It’s set in a community pottery classroom where, just a couple of minutes earlier, one of the same blind kids made a clay ashtray! ‘May’ is unique. It’s a film where black humour and pathos co-exist with a jangling discord that’s always seeping between the lines. May is an awkward, doll-fixated recluse whose life looks like it might open up after she starts to date horror bro Adam. There’s an element of Carrie White and Tommy Ross about their stab at romance, if T Ross were an Argento-head and had the most erotic hands in the cosmos – May’s an expert on that sort of thing, in fact our dawning revelation that she’s only going out with him because of his pinkies is pretty disquieting as far as character arcs go. Her body-part obsession has to foreshadow a leap into full blooded horror at some point, but until its final Frankensteinian swerve, ‘May’ plays like an early noughts art-indie romance, with the grotesque skewing the studied cool through slow, steady drip-feed. If Lucky McKee holds the strange tone so brilliantly, half the draw comes from the performers. Angela Bettis magnetises as the wounded May, fragile and blank as her favourite doll, whilst Anna Faris co-reigns as feverish flirt Polly, always smirking as if she’s just heard the inside track on her own wild time. On top of all that, the Deal sisters-loaded soundtrack is so evocative. I’ve always liked ‘May’, but now I see it as one of its decade’s best.
SIGNIFICANT OTHER – An alien asks someone trapped inside a cocoon “what is love?” The alien has a squirmy tendril arm – f*ck you, Aristophanes! ‘Significant Other’ meditates on the nature of human connection whilst throwing B film moves. I liked the surprising bits – the tracts of clunky philosophising in a cave – but they are outweighed by a pretty standard run through of ‘couple on the brink lost in forest with predatory alien’. A lot of people seem to like it, so I won’t deny the obvious pluses; Maika Monroe is good, it’s all nice and brisk and there’s a few squishy bits to oil the cogs as well as interesting shades of ‘Annihilation’. Also, there’s a kind of joy in seeing a movie nowadays where a severed hand looks a bit rubbery.
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