23: May

The easiest thing to mess up in a horror movie is the ending. Do you know why most generic horror films end in one last predictable jump scare? Necessity. If the bad guy is unquestionably defeated and the film ends on a happy note, then the ending and the rest of the movie have major conflicting tones. If you have the good guys brutally murder the bad guys, you get a closer match, but the endings tend to feel cathartic and the entire movie winds up feeling like a thrill ride rather than a horror film. The ending needs to match the tone of the film, while extending the films themes AND providing a satisfying conclusion to the films plot. There are a lot of ways for an ending to go wrong, and there is only one way to get it right. May's ending is perfect.

The film starts off slowly, dealing with May's (Angela Bettis) rough childhood. She had a lazy eye, and was forced to wear an eyepatch. Everyone always made fun of her for it. In the end, her mother told her that if she couldn't find a friend, she should go make one, and gives her a handmade doll. May takes this lesson to heart, and the doll becomes her first and only true friend. Years later, the doll is still May's only friend. She talks to it day and night, and she never takes it out of its case, just as her mom would have wanted.

Eventually May tries to go and make friends with other people. She doesn't really have any idea what she is doing. She is obsessive and cripplingly shy. She becomes hugely attached to parts of people, even more than the person themselves. She's a big fan of this guys hands, or that person's legs, or Polly's (Anna Farris) neck. May starts getting into fights with her doll (apparently, it doesn't like the people she is hanging out with). It's clear from the beginning that May isn't exactly mentally healthy, and she eventually goes off the deep end when she starts getting rejected by her new friends. In time, she decides to make a new friend, to make up for the ones she was losing. It's pretty easy to see where this is going, but it is still a shock when it happens. May's switch from a victim to a predator is disturbingly abrupt, no one even has time to notice the difference.

This all leads up to the downright scariest ending in any film I've seen. It was perfect, it was spellbinding. I didn't see it coming, but it was really the only way the film could've ended. I was in awe, it was so dark and so vague and so creepy. I wasn't even sure I liked May until I saw the ending, but once I did I loved the film.