In the Flesh: May

“The unwantable woman” is a broad and thematically complex subgenre of horror. From the horny, delusional dysfunction of teen wannabe-surgeon Pauline (Annalynne McCord) in Excision to Maud’s (Morfydd Clark) heartbreakingly inept attempts to make friends in Saint Maud, horror cinema loves to speculate on how and why a woman, especially a thin, beautiful white woman — that perennial object of desire — might be unwanted. May begins with a little girl excluded by her peers because of her lazy eye and hovered over by a tense, neurotic mother who “gives” the young May a best friend in the form of an off-putting handmade doll named Susie, who is never to be removed from her display case or touched under any circumstances. The doll stands in for the upbringing we skip past, a device to focus the loneliness the adult May (Angela Bettis) exudes from her first moment on camera.

Seeing and touching, the two things of which May is chronically deprived, function as the film’s thematic keystones. Bettis’s hands flutter and flex whenever she’s in a lover’s arms, almost but not quite daring to seize and knead and stroke the objects of her desire. She evades eye contact whenever possible, manufacturing scenarios in which someone to whom she is attracted might perceive her, pushing the act of seeing onto others so that she can experience being seen, a state her solitary life has precluded. Her clear social ineptitude invariably tanks even the tenuous connections she manages to establish, both of which are with “normal” people who treat her as a kind of amusing oddity or plaything. They want her, but only until she displays her own personhood, until the naivete and vulnerability which drew them to her in the first place inconveniences them. Nor do May’s lovers possess the willingness or the ability to navigate these sudden frustrations. Both Adam (Jeremy Sisto) and Polly (Ana Faris) evade May’s questions, brush off her concerns, and generally jerk her around until her already fragmented psyche comes apart entirely.

In perhaps the film’s single most uncomfortable image, these two thematic arms merge when May shows Susie — still safe in her case some fifteen years later — to a group of blind children she has volunteered to watch and play with. The children clamor to know what’s inside the case, running their hands over glass and varnished wood as May’s panic mounts at their innocent assault on the rule around which she has structured her oldest attachment: to touch someone is to hurt them. When the inevitable happens, a tug of war resulting in Susie’s case shattered and the children crawling on hands and knees through broken glass, screaming in uncomprehending horror as curiosity transmutes in the space of a moment into agony. You can almost hear the threads of human connection suspending May above the abyss of her own magical thinking begin snapping one by one. To touch the beloved is to destroy it. To know someone in their body is to ruin any possibility of happiness. The dissociative monstrosity which follows is only a formality.