A new movie has after fans labelled it ‘unsettling and upsetting’, but also .
starsand and is loosely inspired by .
It follows an actress Elizabeth (Natalie) who travels to Georgia to meet and study the life of the controversial woman Gracie Atherton-Yoo (Julianne), whom she is set to play in a film.
Gracie has with her husband Joe (Charles Melton) whom she first met as a minor and served a prison sentence for grooming before they went on to later get married and have a family.
After a cinematic release last month, the movie has been released on Netflix in some countries (it is available on Sky Cinema in the UK) and has debuted to rave reviews.
However, many viewers have said they were also left shaken after tuning in.
‘This film is so unsettling, I always feel like something terrifying is about to happen,’ one person posted on X, formerly Twitter.
‘May December is a polarising, unsettling psychological drama that’ll leave you in awe and make your skin crawl,’ someone else shared.
Another added: ‘I can’t stop thinking about it. It’s a darkly humorous but unsettling drama that gets under your skin after those credits have rolled. Very good performances and feels like Hitchock/Chabrolesque too with heavy, foreboding piano score, gaslighting and lots of manipulation.’
Others called it a ‘wild ride’, ‘uncomfortable’ and ‘icky’ while someone else said certain scenes made them ‘want to scream’ watching ‘manipulation and gaslighting’ play out.
It’s also flying up the film charts on Rotten Tomatoes, currently holding a score of 88% on the review site.
Posts from audiences on there have said they were left ‘speechless’ and called it ‘darkly perverse and intriguing’ and ‘as weird as you would expect’.
Ahead of its release, Julianne described working on the film as ‘one of the hardest things I’ve ever done’.
‘I read it [the script’ and was like “Oh, I could do this. It’ll be easy”,’ she told .
‘Then I started working on it and I was like, “No, I can’t! This is one of the hardest things I’ve ever done”. She’s a tough one. This movie is so much about performance and about what stories we tell and how we tell them, and I thought about how Gracie wants her story to be told.’
She added: ‘The key to her is that this is someone who has transgressed greatly, who crossed a boundary in an unbelievable way, and in order to maintain the narrative of it being an acceptable thing to do, she made herself a princess who needs to be rescued, and she made this 13-year-old boy her prince. And that’s terrifying. It’s absolutely terrifying. The tension between that narrative and what actually happened is vast, and that’s where Gracie lives. That’s where all that tension is.’
May December is now streaming on Sky Cinema.
