Bug is based on a play by Tracey Letts, who also wrote Killer Joe and August Osage County. All those scrpts contained a central part who is a monster, manipulative, even unhinged. Bug is similarly gifted, plus being directed by William Friedkin with the same chilling intensity and sparseness that's characterised his work from The Exorcist onwards.
There is a small dilapidated motel off a busy highway, going from nowhere to nowhere. In a hotel apartment lives Agnes (Ashley Judd) a woman with a cocaine habit, and a soon to be returning, coercive and violent ex- husband Jerry (Harry Connick Jnr). Into this sad past steps Peter (Micheal Shannon) a loner, who seemingly just wants Agnes's friendship. Instinctively something is not quite right about him. As the film progresses, the relationship between Agnes and Peter begins to partake in a common paranoia and delusion, that the hotel room and their bodies are infested with genetically modified bugs.
Micheal Shannon played the part in the theatre, so it is not surprising that he seems the most assured actor in the entire film. This is most evident in the film's climactic ending between Agnes and Peter, where barely suppressed hysteria could easily have led a lesser actor into a hyperventilating performance that was a little unsubtle. Judd teeters on the edge of OTT, whereas Shannon's restraint does not.
The structure of the story line is such that the mutually deluded nature of the relationship between Agnes and Peter, forms slowly in your mind. The film does however appear to suddenly crank up several gears in the last third, in a way that almost unbalances the film and makes you want to bale out.
This is extremely uncomfortable film making to watch, that not everyone will wish to stay with to the end. Given its age, 2006, its extremely prescient about the mutual delusion and cod psychology of conspiracy theorists, that now bedevils modern society. Its the most unsettling movie I've watched in quite a while, one that has tended to live on in my imagination whether I want it to or not.
CARROT REVIEW - 6/8
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