---

For the title character of writer-director Lucky McKee’s 2002 feature-filmmaking debut (Angela Bettis), loneliness is so inextricable from her sense of self that it’s practically a given, hardly different from having naturally dark hair or skin as pale as porcelain. May was born with a lazy eye, and when her mom dropped her off at school for the first time she made her daughter cover it up with an eyepatch. She left her with advice that amounts to, “don’t take it off or else nobody will like you.” (The eyepatch doesn’t have the intended effect in any case: a boy asks if May’s a pirate before he and some other classmates in the schoolyard quietly back off from a girl they’ve tacitly written off as a freak.) There never arrived after that a moment where May eventually found friends who could move past her eye or the debilitating shyness her self-consciousness has wrought; early in the film, at a birthday party only attended by her fretting parents, May is gifted a homemade doll from her mother with scared blue eyes who is forbidden from ever leaving the glass box in which she’s delicately propped. 

In adulthood, much has remained the same for May — her outsiderness, her only having the doll (and many wide-eyed others) to talk to — although now she works as a veterinarian tech and lives alone. She has a crush on a nearby mechanic with doggish floppy hair and a thing for horror movies named Adam (Jeremy Sisto) and is good-enough friends with Polly (Anna Faris), a lesbian coworker. Shortly into the movie, she gets her eye “fixed” with glasses and contacts, gets some new confidence, and finds herself suddenly romantically wanted by Adam, whom she’ll stalk for a while before he notices her and compliments her “weirdness,” and Polly, a sexual free-spirit who’s surprised to be turned on when May delicately slices herself with scalpels to pass the time at work. 

Human interaction, though, seems not to heal the wounds of May’s long-enduring alienation. It seems only to rub proverbial salt into the kind of harmful derangement that’s maybe always been a possibility but too cocooned by the world May has constructed for herself to ever appear. You gulp nervously as a woman who makes figurines to pass the time is complimenting Adam’s hands, Polly’s neck — when she’s recounting to Adam a little too gleefully at a park a bloody post-surgery accident she just dealt with at work. 

May eventually reveals itself an account of a woman’s violent breakdown; it skillfully avoids caricaturing her mental illness, exaggerating its grotesqueries to feed lurid interest. What’s novel about the movie — itself rare because of its centering of the perspective of a character that would likely be a villainous supporting player in a more conventional horror film — is how much sympathy, even identification, we feel for someone with whom one will hopefully stop identifying by the third act. Who hasn’t been there: feeling desperately lonely, unseen by the people with whom you spend most of your time? 

Bettis’ performance is a marvel, inviting compassion and care and also wariness — fear of what May could be capable of. So too are Sisto’s and Faris’, their characters oblivious to the harm they cause but never in a way that strikes you as immoderately cruel. For May, enough little emotional cuts make a larger injury from which it’s impossible to recover. No movie antagonist of May’s ilk is not largely fueled by their own suffering reaching a breaking point after years of bottling it in. But that can largely be forgotten, or rendered trivial, when their point of view is only ancillary to the story. McKee pulls off a delicate balancing act: making us feel sympathy for the devil without teetering into irresponsible areas of justification.