May (film) - Plot

Plot

May Dove Canady (Angela Bettis) is an awkward, lonely young woman, who suffered a troubled childhood due to her lazy eye. She has very few social interactions, her only "true friend" being a glass-encased doll named Suzie made by her mother and given to May for her birthday with the adage "If you can't find a friend, make one."

May works at a veterinary hospital, assisting with surgeries. Her optometrist fixes May's lazy eye, first with glasses, then with a special form of contact lens. As May attempts to be more social, she becomes friends with Adam (Jeremy Sisto), a local mechanic. She has a fixation on his hands, which she considers to be the most attractive part of him, and they start dating. Meanwhile, May's lesbian colleague Polly (Anna Faris) begins to flirt with May, while simultaneously poking fun at her for her oddness. One day while feeling especially low, May remarks that Polly has a beautiful neck. Polly then gives her pet cat Lupe to May, ostensibly because of her "bitch" landlord.

One night May invites Adam to her apartment. Adam shows her a film he made for his university titled Jack and Jill. The film reveals a story of two young lovers who go on a picnic and end up eating each other. May becomes aroused by the cannibalism in the film and, during an intense make-out session, bites Adam on the lip. Bleeding profusely, Adam is finally disturbed by May's strange personality and leaves. May feels guilty and blames her doll Suzie for encouraging her to make bad choices. She shouts at Suzie and shoves her in the cupboard.

May begins working at a school for disabled children. She is especially interested in the blind children and identifies with a lonely girl named Petey David, who makes her a clay ashtray with May's name carved into it.

May finally gives in to Polly's wiles and starts a short affair. Meanwhile, Adam stops calling her and May goes to his house and overhears him say that he is glad he could get rid of May. Heartbroken, May goes to see Polly, only to find Polly with another girl named Ambrosia. Totally miserable, May returns home. When Lupe refuses to come near her, she becomes enraged and throws the clay ashtray, killing Lupe. May becomes delusional, thinking that her doll Suzie is talking to her through its glass case.

May takes Suzie to school and tells the blind children that Suzie is her best friend. As the children struggle to take the doll out of the glass case, it falls and shatters resulting in the kids and May cutting themselves in the process. Carrying the now-destroyed, blood-covered Suzie, May returns home, devastated.

The following day, May meets a punk boy named Blank (James Duval). He is interested in her remarks that people cannot be entirely perfect, only have perfect "parts". May doesn't like Blank, but she likes the tattoo on his arm. They go to May's house and when he opens the freezer to get ice, he finds the cat's corpse wrapped in plastic wrap. Blank panics and calls May a freak, infuriating her; she stabs him in the head with a pair of scissors. Suddenly, she realizes that the people she had considered her friends were not friends at all; there were only parts of them that were friends. She concludes that a perfect friend can only be made of all the perfect parts of people.

On Halloween night, May dresses in a homemade costume similar to Suzie's dress and goes to Polly's house. She kills Polly with scalpels from the animal hospital. When Ambrosia arrives, May admires her legs and stabs Ambrosia with the scalpels. When May goes to Adam's house, she finds him with Hoop, a girl with hoop earrings. May stabs them both.

At home, May designs her "new friend", Amy, a Frankenstein-esque life-sized rag doll made from Blank's arms, Polly's neck, Adam's hands, Ambrosia's legs, Hoop's ears, and Lupe's fur to substitute for hair. The head and torso are different scraps of fabric stitched together and stuffed. Once the macabre doll is finished, May realizes that Amy can't see her. In a rush of misery, May gouges out her right eye, the lazy one, with the scissors. Crying in pain and bleeding, she puts her eye on Amy's head and begs the doll to look at her. A dying May smiles when she sees her friend come to life and touch her face with Adam's hands.

Read more about this topic:  May (film)

Famous quotes containing the word plot:

    The plot was most interesting. It belonged to no particular age, people, or country, and was perhaps the more delightful on that account, as nobody’s previous information could afford the remotest glimmering of what would ever come of it.
    Charles Dickens (1812–1870)

    If you need a certain vitality you can only supply it yourself, or there comes a point, anyway, when no one’s actions but your own seem dramatically convincing and justifiable in the plot that the number of your days concocts.
    John Ashbery (b. 1927)

    There comes a time in every man’s education when he arrives at the conviction that envy is ignorance; that imitation is suicide; that he must take himself for better for worse as his portion; that though the wide universe is full of good, no kernel of nourishing corn can come to him but through his toil bestowed on that plot of ground which is given him to till.
    Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803–1882)