‘May December’ review: The Netflix movie that side-eyes Netflix true crime

Todd Haynes has made a gorgeous, elegant, and darkly funny movie for Netflix, and it’s about how much of Netflix’s true crime content can be inhumane trash. 

With May December, Haynes is pulling a fascinating bait-and-switch. On its surface, the thriller written by Samy Burch seems like a ripped-from-the-headlines Netflix docudrama. But with prestigious talent attached like the heralded Haynes (Carol, Far From Heaven) and Academy Award-winning leading ladies Natalie Portman and Julianne Moore, moviegoers might rightly expect an arthouse elevation of tabloid tawdriness. And they’ll get it, and so much more. 

Burch and Haynes aren’t content to plumb a jaw-dropping tale of power dynamics and abuse masquerading as love. In league with their star-studded cast, they turn a razor-sharp wit and ruthless focus on their audience and our insatiable thirst for true crime carnage, as well as those that feed it. 

Is May December about the Mary Kay Letourneau story? 

At the film’s press screening during the New York Film Festival, Burch shied away from the comparison, jokingly suggesting she was too young to remember the 1997 scandal. “I’m a baby,” she cheekily responded, before adding, “All of these stories like this are in The Ether. They are just completely embedded in everyone’s cultural history.”

However, the similarities between Letourneau’s story and May December aren’t slight. In both, a thirtysomething American white woman engages in sexual acts with a seventh-grade boy, is convicted of rape, gives birth to their child in prison, and after her sentence is served, goes on to marry the now-grown boy. Yet these similarities are not the point of the movie. 

May December is set 20 years after Gracie Atherton (Julianne Moore) was caught in a pet store supply closet with Joe Yoo (played as an adult by Charles Melton). Nowadays, they live in a big house, where they throw barbecues for their neighbors and kids, including twins who are graduating high school. Theirs seems to be a relatively quiet life, as long as you ignore the packages of human shit that show up on their doorstep and the vocal derision from Gracie’s adult son from her first marriage (Cory Michael Smith as a blistering — and righteously so! — brat). But this relatively peaceful post-tabloid existence is disrupted when an actress intrudes, seeking to make provocative art of their lives. 

Julianne Moore offers a scorching villain turn for the ages. 

Despite her lofty talk of research and loving “morally gray” roles, actress Elizabeth Berry (a smirking Natalie Portman) is greatest known for a television series called “Norah’s Ark,” which might be about a veterinarian who solves crime. Famous but far from fancy, Elizabeth sees playing Gracie as the role that could change her professional status, transforming her into a provocateur and a serious actress. As such, Elizabeth keenly observes not only how this wife/mother/national disgrace moves and talks but also how she subtly manipulates those around her. 

Make no mistake. While Haynes has told stories of misunderstood lovers before, in films like Carol and Velvet Goldmine, that is not his aim with May December. Julianne Moore, who starred in Haynes’s Safe and Far From Heaven, crafts Gracie with a gentle facade. This infamous woman, draped in beiges and pale pinks, has big doe eyes and speaks through a broadly loving smile, whether doting on her children, finishing a complicated cake, or confronting hate mail. 

But as Elizabeth watches, Gracie’s insidious manipulations creep up past the sugary frosting. Out shopping for a graduation dress with her teen daughter, Mary (Elizabeth Yu) — with Elizabeth in tow — Gracie bullies the girl out of a particular gown by chirping, “You’re so brave to show your arms like that.” Duly fat-shamed, Mary chooses a more conservative dress that aligns with her mother’s vision. Later, behind closed doors, Gracie will push Joe to do her bidding by exploding into tears at the least disagreement. But even more slippery than these cutting comments or crocodile tears is her voice. 

Whether speaking of her love for Joe or her view of the world, Gracie has a curious lisp. It comes and goes, so at first, you might not clock it. Some viewers might wonder perhaps if Moore has lost her touch, but this lisp is mercilessly strategic. When Gracie goes unquestioned, it is not noticeable. When she’s pleading her naïveté or pressuring with a grin, the lisp comes out to seemingly soften her touch, a velvet glove for her hammering force of personality. 

Natalie Portman rattles as a satirical Hollywood nightmare. 

Elizabeth witnesses much of Gracie’s beguiling and passive-aggressive manipulation, drinking it in like fine wine. Over the course of the film, she’ll mimic her motions, copy her style, and even take Gracie up on a make-up tutorial. On one level, Portman is an illustration of how Hollywood feigns a high-minded interest in true crime, projecting the idea that they are building art from tragedy and so are above its human collateral. But Elizabeth’s interest in Gracie is blatantly self-centered, concocting for herself a role so shocking it’s bound to break her out of her boring TV box. It’s scandal as a social ladder, using Gracie’s family (and victims) — many of whom she independently interviews — as the rungs she steps on without a second thought. Elizabeth is decidedly not bothered by how Gracie’s children feel about this will-be movie, and she treats Joe not like a person but as an experiment for her study. 

The cruelty of this psychological distancing is made into dark punchlines throughout the film, making May December’s audience slyly complicit. Elizabeth coyly flirts with Joe to see how it feels “to sneak around” with him. Her conversations with an unseen producer range from inappropriate to casually obscene, like when she complains that the child stars being cast for her movie’s seventh grader “aren’t sexy enough.” There’s a ruthlessness here that Burch mocks with the dialogue, and which Portman hammers home with her blase delivery. Elizabeth is obsessed with the gory details of this case, but she’s not emotionally invested. It’s all at a distance for her — and we can laugh because there’s a remove for us too. 

In this, Haynes and Burch set up their condemnation of the true-crime audience who craves endless stories of human depravity and the studios that line them up in a buffet — as Netflix does. 

May December mocks the concept of high-art true crime. 

This narrative film might be lumped in with true crime offerings like Netflix’s Dahmer; Extremely Wicked, Shockingly Evil and Vile; Inventing Anna;  The Watcher, or Woman of the Hour — dramas in which a criminal is explored with breathless excitement. But such a comparison would be a disservice to May December, not just because folding in Elizabeth’s narrative offers a protective layer to distance it from being “based on real events.” Elizabeth becomes the fulcrum from which the story pivots away from rehashing grisly true crime details to a critique of the genre. In fact, these details are largely glossed over with a quick smattering of collected tabloid headlines and a curt conversation across a kitchen table. 

Instead, May December dives into the public’s fascination with these cases. Elizabeth is our funhouse mirror representative, probing into the private lives of the survivors and victims to satisfy her own ghoulish curiosity. She wants to get as close to the criminal as possible, perhaps to even imagine the thrill of the crime. As a satire, Haynes and Bruch push the story to places that will and should make their audience squirm. This is not the story of one predator but two. Elizabeth — and all she represents — is carrion, feeding on the wounded and the dead. And as Elizabeth watches Gracie, we watch her. 

To Burch’s credit, her screenplay is wickedly witty with its barbs at Hollywood’s cannibalistic nature, where every tragedy might be a selling point. She also folds in elements of the ’90s erotic thriller, like a tawdry seduction scene capped with a purposefully cringey conclusion, so what might come off as a scolding lecture is actually devilishly fun. You could even argue that Burch risks falling down the same slippery slope of those other Netflix properties by giving us a central criminal who is more than meets the eye and played by a beloved performer. But this risk is perhaps exactly why May December is so exciting, because it bravely walks this tightrope, never taking a misstep. 

Where other true crime films offer heroic cops or clever citizen sleuths as heroes, May December has no heroes. Instead, it is a tale of tangled obsessions, dark and human but not humane. And in the end, there is no comforting title card promising closure. There will be no satisfaction of justice served. Boldly, Haynes leaves us with the haunting feeling that the spiral just goes deeper and darker. In that way, May December is more honest about true crime than much of Netflix’s flashier fare. 

How to watch: May December is now streaming on Netflix.

UPDATE: Nov. 30, 2023, 11:20 a.m. EST May December was reviewed out of the New York Film Festival. The review has been republished for its debut on Netflix.