“Bug”
Director William Friedkin
Lions Gate Films
(Out Of 5)
If you really want to get something out of “Bug,” here’s a piece of advice: Don’t pay attention to the bugs. Pay attention to the characters.
Watch Peter Evans as he slowly and subtly reveals the chilling depth of his madness and paranoia with incremental precision. Watch Agnes White’s drastic transformation from a lonely, crusty alcoholic to a trembling, needy paranoid.
Or better yet, watch something else. Even though “Bug” manages not to be just another gory horror flick, as the credits roll you will come to the realization that you were at the edge of your seat for no reason at all.
“Bug” is a psychological thinker film masquerading as a gory horror flick. A plain-spoken woman named Agnes White (Ashley Judd) lives in fear of the return of her criminal husband. When Peter Evans (Michael Shannon), a strange, unsettled drifter enters her life, Agnes overlooks his insidious lapses of sanity to foster a budding romance. Together, their isolation and fear metamorphose into an unrestrained paranoia.
“Exorcist” director William Friedkin does a passable job of keeping viewers off balance and fairly paranoid themselves. Phones ring at unexpected times for unexplained reasons, while mysterious helicopter blades beat constantly overhead, adding the encompassing sense of expectation that dominates the earlier half of the film.
However, the film’s greatest success stems from its mercilessly frank portrayal of the twisted actions of the two extreme paranoids. Friedkin points the camera unerringly at the frenzied and often bloody interaction of the twisted couple, played with laudable commitment by Judd and Shannon. The film’s most effective moments come during wild-eyed dialogues fraught with deranged rationalizations and twitchy, self-destructive behaviors that hint at a dementia truly disturbing to behold.
Though “Bug” labors successfully to portray the unnerving extremes of paranoia, it’s simply not a very rewarding movie to watch. Once you realize that no zombies, aliens or psychotic killers are going to barrel into the rundown hotel room in which the entire film takes place, the pace of the film slows to a crawl, and the slow-burning narrative seems to lose its purpose. As the scope of the film shrinks to include only the twisted inhabitants of the hotel room, viewers will be too disturbed to fall asleep, though they will want to.
Adapted from Tracy Lett’s off-Broadway play of the same name, the translation fails to take advantage of the medium of film. “Bug” is too much a devious character study and too little a film worth watching.