Twenty years after their notorious tabloid romance gripped the nation, a married couple buckles under the pressure when an actress arrives to do research for a film about their past.
Natalie Portman, Julianne Moore, Charles Melton, Cory Michael Smith, Elizabeth Yu, Gabriel Chung, Piper Curda, D.W. Moffett, Chris Tenzis, Andrea Frankle, Mikenzie Taylor, Jocelyn Shelfo, Mike Lopez, Joan Reilly, Charles Green, Christopher Nguyen, Adam Woods, Lawrence Arancio, Kelvin Han Yee, Julie Ivey
Where to watch
Netflix, Netflix Standard with Ads
Curator Review
Verdict
A sharp, queasy character study that blends prestige-drama polish with tabloid melodrama, then slowly reveals something much darker underneath. It’s especially effective if you like films where performance, repression, and moral ambiguity matter as much as plot.
Best for
viewers who like psychologically tense dramas
fans of campy surface with tragic undercurrents
people interested in performance, identity, and self-mythology
audiences who enjoy unsettling, actor-driven films
viewers drawn to stories about scandal and media gaze
Skip if
you want a straightforward emotional drama
you dislike ambiguity and tonal shifts
you prefer warm, sympathetic characters
you’re not interested in uncomfortable subject matter
you want a fast-moving plot with clear catharsis
Overview
Todd Haynes turns a sensational premise into something far stranger and more corrosive: a study of people trapped inside the stories they tell about themselves. The film is glossy, funny, and deliberately artificial at first, but that surface keeps cracking until the emotional damage underneath becomes impossible to ignore.
Worth noting
The performances do a huge amount of the work. Natalie Portman and Julianne Moore play off each other with unnerving precision, while Charles Melton gives the film its rawest, most devastating center. He’s the one who makes the movie tip from social satire into something closer to horror.
Bottom line
What lingers is the film’s sense of moral unease. It’s about exploitation, but also about how people normalize the unbearable when it serves their self-image. That makes it provocative, sometimes uncomfortable, and very much worth watching if you like dramas that keep mutating in your head after they end.
Top Letterboxd reviews
Joe A (4.5★) · 21848 likes
Charles fucking Melton. I don’t want to reduce a movie that’s clearly crafted with so much skill to create scenes brimming with unease to a single performance, but Melton is so absurdly good that without him, I’m not sure how this movie reaches those insane harrowing levels. His body language, his mannerisms, his delivery— he is the personification of stolen innocence and your heart breaks for him.
Portman, Moore, the campy piano melody that plays after a reveal, the dressing room shot, the Portman letter monologue— all pieces of a sick and tragic puzzle that is May December.
✩clara✩ (5★) · 19493 likes
so scary how mentally you remain the age you were when your trauma happened... charles melton encapsulated that so well
Hungkat (4★) · 16842 likes
It’s all soap and camp until Charles Melton cracks, and you realize what you’ve been watching is a horror movie all along.
Matt Singer (4.5★) · 14278 likes
“This is just what grownups do.”
James (Schaffrillas) (4.5★) · 11756 likes
Wanted to crawl out of my own skin for basically the entire runtime
2011 · Drama, Thriller · 1h 53m · R · Curator 6.8/10 (710.7K ratings) · Where to watch: Amazon Prime Video, Peacock Premium, Philo, MUBI, OVID, Cineverse, Midnight Pulp, Amazon Prime Video with Ads, Peacock Premium Plus
For viewers drawn to chilly psychological discomfort, parental dread, and moral uncertainty.