May (film) - Critical Reception

Critical Reception

The film received mostly positive reviews from critics. Review aggregator Rotten Tomatoes reports that 68% of 63 critics have given the film a positive review, with a rating average of 6.1 out of 10. Metacritic, which assigns a weighted average score out of 100 to reviews from mainstream critics, the film received an average score of 58 based on 18 reviews.

Roger Ebert granted the film four stars out of four, and called it "a horror film and something more and deeper, something disturbing and oddly moving" and characterized the dénouement as "a final shot that would get laughs in another kind of film, but May earns the right to it, and it works, and we understand it". Variety magazine critic David Rooney turned in a review that was more middle of the road, stating that the film was "More successful when the title character finally embarks on her bloody mission than in the dawdling buildup". The New York Times critic Stephen Holden opined that "the performances are a cut or two above what you would find in the average slasher film. But in the end that's all it is".

In 2006, the Chicago Film Critics Association named May the 61st scariest film ever made.

Bloody Disgusting ranked the film seventeenth in their list of the 'Top 20 Horror Films of the Decade', with the article calling the film "criminally under-seen at the time of its release... The plotting itself manages to sidestep the usual slasher tropes as it slowly and inexorably unravels, all leading up to a quietly haunting conclusion that is as heart-wrenching as it is unnerving."