‘May December’ Ending Explained: Breaking Down That Disturbing Final Scene (2024)

If you’re looking for a riveting tale of emotional manipulation, power, and repression, good news: May December is now streaming on Netflix.

Directed by Todd Haynes (Carol, Dark Waters), with a screenplay by Samy Burch, the film is already gaining Oscar buzz, having won prizes at the recent Gotham Awards and New York Film Critics Circle Awards. It’s a drama loosely inspired by the ’90s scandal about a 30-something woman caught sexually abusing a 13-year-old boy, who went on to have a decades-long relationship with him. May December imagines a couple in a similar situation 20 years later, now meeting with a famous actress set to play the sex offender in the movie version of their life.

Natalie Portman delivers one of the best performances of her career, and break-out star Charles Melton will blow you away. You won’t be able to tear your eyes from the screen. But the ending may leave you with some questions. Don’t worry, Decider is here to help. Read on for a breakdown of the May December plot summary and the May December ending, explained.

May December plot summary:

Elizabeth Berry (Natalie Portman) is a famous TV actress who travels to Georgia to research her role in an upcoming, based-on-a-true-story, Oscar-bait drama. Elizabeth will portray Gracie Atherton-Yoo (Julianne Moore), who was arrested when she was 36 years old, after she was caught having sex with a 13-year-old boy. Over 20 years later, she and that boy, Joe(Charles Melton), are still together. Joe is now the same age that Gracie was when she met him. The couple insists it was always a loving, consensual relationship, Their two children, twins, are about to graduate from high school. The ugly past has been buried—until Elizabeth decides to dig it up.

Gracie is immediately mistrustful of Elizabeth, and for good reason. Though she is polite and nice to Gracie’s face, we also witness Elizabeth speaking to an unnamed partner on the phone, where she makes clear she considers Gracie a morally bankrupt sexual predator. But as Elizabeth tells a group of high school theater students—in an unsettling scene where Elizabeth visits the school of Gracie’s daughter, Mary—she revels in the chance to play a character whose actions are reprehensible. She manipulates both Gracie and Joe in the hopes of digging up more “emotional truth,” aka dirt, to help her play the part. You can practically see her picturing her Oscar speech.

As Elizabeth interviews various people in the town, we slowly get more details of how Gracie and Joe’s relationship happened. In the summer after seventh grade, 13-year-old Joe had a summer job at the pet store where Gracie worked. Gracie, who was already married and had two kids with another man, initiated an affair. They had planned to keep the relationship a secret until Joe turned 18 but were then caught having sex in the storeroom. Gracie never felt she did anything wrong, even as she carried a teen boy’s children while she was in prison. It’s revealed she is emotionally unstable, prone to mental breakdowns over trivial things like customers canceling orders for her catering business. In many ways, she treats Joe like another one of her children, nagging him to do chores or clean up his “bugs.”

Joe has a special interest in hatching butterflies at home and releasing them into the wild, to help combat the declining butterfly population. Though he insists to Elizabeth that he is not a victim—that he is definitely in love with and happy with Gracie—the first hint that he is dissatisfied is the intimate, text-based relationship he has with a fellow butterfly breeder from his butterfly Facebook group. Later, he cries in the arms of his teenage son after smoking weed for the first time, confessing that he worries every day about something bad happening. It’s an indication that deep down, Joe knows he was a victim. He knows bad things can happen to young, vulnerable boys, because a bad thing happened to him. It’s clear Joe is considering freeing himself from his life with Gracie, much like one of the butterflies he sets free.

Elizabeth attempts to flirt with Joe to get his side of the story, but he brushes her off. She meets Gracie’s children from her previous marriage, including Georgie (Cory Michael Smith), an angry young man whose life was ruined by his mother’s crime. Georgie tells Elizabeth that his mother was raped by her older brothers when she was a young girl, which led to her behavior today. He tells Elizabeth that he will tell her more, if can get him a role on the movie as a music supervisor. Elizabeth calls her director to extend her stay, and it’s reveals she’s having an affair with him. She also tells the director they need to cast a “sexier” 13-year-old actor than the ones who have sent audition tapes so far, to which the director replies that Elizabeth needs to come home.

Eventually, Elizabeth successfully seduces Joe and sleeps with him. Joe gives Elizabeth a copy of a love letter that Gracie once sent to him before their relationship was discovered. Elizabeth encourages Joe to leave Gracie but lets slip that she sees this situation as a “story,” rather than as real people living real lives. Joe is understandably pissed at Elizabeth for this.

That night, Joe finally confronts Gracie and attempts to have a conversation about the fact that he was too young to make the kinds of decisions that she forced him to make. He is shaking and sobbing and begging Gracie for help, but she refuses. She shuts down the conversation and refuses to listen. “It’s graduation,” she tells him.

May December ending explained:

On the morning of graduation, Gracie is gone from the house, out hunting in the woods. She sees a young fox but hesitates instead of shooting it. (It’s a metaphor for how she preyed on Joe as a young boy.) Joe has a pleasant morning with his children and symbolically lets one of his butterflies fly free. (It’s a metaphor both for Joe letting his children free into the world and for Joe freeing himself from this life with Gracie.)

At graduation, Joe doesn’t sit with Gracie and Elizabeth. Instead, he watches his children graduate from outside the gate of the school. He cries and then takes a deep breath as if letting go of something. Though it is not made explicit, the implication is that, now that his children have graduated, Joe will leave Gracie and start his life over. But, as we saw in the breakfast scene, he will still have a relationship with his children.

In the final conversation between Gracie and Elizabeth, Gracie asks Elizabeth if she understands her, and Elizabeth replies that she does. But then Gracie drops a bomb that makes Elizabeth question everything: She knows that Georgie told Elizabeth she was molested, and says it’s not true.

“I hope you didn’t think that disgusting brother thing was real,” Gracie says. “I don’t know what he’s doing telling you these things.”

“He told you?” Elizabeth asks, incredulous.

“I talk to Georgie every day,” Gracie replies. “Insecure people are very dangerous, aren’t they? I’m secure. Make sure you put that in there.”

Elizabeth is shaken. She was so ready to believe the clichéd, trauma-p*rn story that Georgie fed her, but it turns out, Gracie and Joe’s story is far more complicated than that. It’s a moment that shows Elizabeth, for all of her smug superiority over the situation, doesn’t truly understand these people at all. Sometimes, twisted people are just twisted, and there’s no good reason for it.

The final scene of the movie takes place on the set of Elizabeth’s film. She is filming a scene between Gracie and young Joe in the pet store, in which Gracie is flirting with Joe by showing him a snake. (Subtle!) The actor cast to play Joe looks far older than 13; Elizabeth got her wish for a “sexier” actor. They run the scene three times, and each time the sexual tension is amped up a little bit more, with Elizabeth getting more tactile. After the third take the director says they’ve got it, but Elizabeth asks to do it again. “Please,” she says. “It’s getting more real.”

The music swells as the actors reset the scene. The camera zooms in on Elizabeth’s face, and with that, the movie ends.

What does it mean? Well, it’s open to interpretation. But my read is that Elizabeth is, if not just as twisted as Gracie, at least not nearly as morally superior to the sex offender as she thought. you saw a hint of Elizabeth’s dark side earlier in the film, when she got far too explicit with high schoolers while describing filming sex scenes. Now, she is becoming Gracie. She is enabling and condoning Gracie’s heinous crime, in her narcissistic attempt to “understand” the older woman. She is not the hero of this story.

Why is the movie called May December?

I’ll let director Todd Haynes answer that one, in a quote from a interview for the movie’s production notes: “May December is a term for a relationship between some- one younger and someone much older. I thought it was a nuanced way of setting up the terms of the film right in the title. May is also an important month in this film because that’s when it takes place. There’s obviously all the stress and tension of an actress coming to visit this family and poke into the past and open up these tender histories, but it’s also leading up to the graduation of the last two kids at home and an empty nest, which this couple is facing. And so all of that has to do with May, and the graduation of the twins happens toward the end of the film.”