Watching writer-director Karen Cinorre’s new film, Mayday, feels like immersing yourself in someone else’s dream. In this case, that person is Ana (Grace Van Patten), a waitress with a violent boss who suddenly wakes up in an alternate reality after being electrocuted on the job. There, she meets Mia Goth’s Marsha, a mischievous and possibly evil girl who recruits her into a war whose goal is seemingly for women to lure as many male soldiers as possible to their deaths. As Marsha explains later, these women are “getting even” with the men–and men in general–who hurt them in their real lives and while Ana is initially seduced by this newfound power, she eventually begins to question whether she belongs in this new world.
Even before Ana slips into her dream world, there’s something uncanny about Mayday. There are dark clouds on the horizon before she enters the banquet hall where she works and someone on the radio who sounds suspiciously like Goth warns of some impending doom. Goth herself appears first as an anxious bride on the verge of tears, who Ana tries to comfort only to be menaced by her boss for it. Cinorre deliberately keeps the dialogue oblique here, always leaving the audience struggling to grasp all the emotions and meanings at work in any given moment. People, themes and even lines of dialogue echo in the alternate reality from Ana’s real life and trying to understand why Ana is experiencing things this way is like being asked to interpret the dream of someone we’ve never met.
That said, while Mayday can be difficult to contextualize in any given moment, the strength of its ethereal tone is fascinating enough that the film never becomes completely alienating. Perhaps most immediately noticeable are Ivan Veljača’s production design and Ola Staszko’s costuming, which subtly move us from a version of the present to a fantasy version of World War II. The beached submarine where Ana and the other girls live feels conceivably like it could be a real military vessel, but also feels almost like a child’s imagined version of a submarine from an adventure story. Likewise, the relaxed military clothing the girls wear–presumably taken from the soldiers they kill–feels both lived in and just stylish enough to feel like part of an adventure fantasy.
Perhaps most integral to the film’s dreamy quality, though, are Sam Levy’s cinematography and Colin Stetson’s score. The former never frames things in an expected way, making moments where Ana simply walks from her car or dead soldiers sink slowly through the water at once beautiful as a painting, undefinably sinister and most of all, tinged with unreality. Stetson’s score is similarly haunting, often filled with female voices that seem like angel songs one minute and the next remind us that Marsha and the girls are like twisted sirens, luring men to their deaths for sport. These elements combine most wonderfully in a scene that presumably represents Ana murdering a large group of soldiers but plays as a dance number. The stoic boys dance with and for Ana as she smiles beatifically. Like any strange, confusing dream, the scene is both beautiful and unnerving, but impossible to not marvel at regardless.
While Mayday is compelling in its dreamy images and the way it constantly leaves the audience struggling to understand, it weakens as its ideas begin to coalesce toward a larger meaning near the end. When Marsha teaches Ana to lure men on the radio early in the film by saying, “they like their girls softer, less authority,” it doesn’t feel like a forced moment of discourse, but a clever critique of the ways women are expected to act under patriarchy. However, as the film goes on, the moments where a sort of pop feminist lingo leaks into the dialogue begin to ring false. At one point, in a seemingly final act of rejection of the violence Marsha represents, Ana declares, “I’m not that kind of girl.” The moment is supposed to be triumphant, Ana’s reclamation of who she is, but the moment reads as cheesy, even embarrassingly cliché, and it throws into question exactly what kind of message Cinorre is trying to deliver.
Admittedly, it’s possible that Cironne is intentionally shifting the feminist discourse embodied by Ana’s story closer to an earlier girl power ideal than the anger and comeuppance that has driven the last few years of post-#MeToo anger. The question, however, is whether that shift unintentionally weakens the film’s overall sense of female empowerment. Take the following exchange late in the film. Angered that Ana has lost faith in the cause, Marsha yells, “I made you into a hero,” and Ana responds back, “you made me into a psychopath,” only for Marsha to furiously retort, “it’s the same thing!” Perhaps what Cinorre intends to do with that scene is critique the genre conventions of a war picture, which are so steeped in masculinity, but it’s just as easy to read that exchange and the film’s last act as a categorical rejection of anger-driven feminism with no acknowledgement that while anger can be damaging, it can also be extremely productive. Taken that way, Mayday can feel at best unsophisticated or at worst, conservative and regressive.
Still, sticky as some possible readings of Mayday can be, it’s perhaps a mistake to ascribe a concrete meaning to what is essentially meant to mimic a dream. Every element, from the use of Greek mythology to the WWII-sequence setting, is figurative and each viewer will likely interpret them differently depending on what biases and preoccupations they bring to the film. Indeed, there is so much thought and emotional complexity at work in Mayday that it only becomes more interesting and layered the more times you watch it.
