Director: William Friedkin
Writer: Tracy Letts
Cinematographer: Michael Grady
Starring: Ashley Judd, Michael Shannon, Harry Connick Jr., Lynn Collins
Studio/Running Time: Lions Gate, 102 mins.
“Bugs in my bed, bugs in my ears, their eggs in my head…see them deciding my fate.”
-Pearl Jam “Bugs”
Ashley Judd can act, but can she save William Friedkin’s Bug? After all, this is a film with an identity crisis from the start, considering the fact that it’s not a horror movie despite its marketing. (One ad depicted “B-U-G” spelled out on a man’s raised skin with the caption, “From the director of The Exorcist.”)
What is Bug, then? An adaptation of a stage play, most of the film takes place in a motel room where Agnes (Judd), a depressed and lonely bar waitress, is living a down-trodden life while trying to avoid her abusive, recently-paroled ex-husband (Harry Connick, Jr.). She meets Peter (Michael Shannon), an oddball drifter with whom she begins a strange romance. Peter’s personal battles with bugs (real or imagined, we’re unsure) are adopted as her fears as well, and give new meaning to the word “co-dependency”. Together they spiral into a paranoid existence that builds toward a frantic and slightly-hysterical climax.
Judd is totally convincing, though you may want to scream at her character’s gullibility. Meanwhile, Shannon is just downright creepy – the kind of guy you begin conversing with at a cocktail party, only to immediately regret the decision and look for a reason to flee. Despite these compelling characters, though, Bug falls a bit flat. And the couple’s self-imposed isolation and obsessive search for creepy-crawlies? Well, that really just bugs me.