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Bug (2006)
Director: William Friedkin
Movie review
From Time Out Chicago
“Who the fuck doesn’t have a TV? How are you supposed to know what’s going on in the world?” asks a character midway through William Friedkin’s darkly allusive slow-burn horror movie, based on the play by Chicago’s own Tracy Letts. Coming a few minutes after a rant by a possibly brain-damaged war veteran about the inescapability of (among other things) technology, chemicals and information, these questions point to hidden meanings at the core of Bug, whose characters are obsessed with hidden meanings. Does contemporary paranoia stem from the concealment of information or its excess? And what exactly qualifies as paranoia in a world where even the news resembles some psychotic mass delusion? Ashley Judd plays Agnes, a broken-down waitress living in a cheap motel in rural Oklahoma. Fearful that her recently paroled ex-husband might return at any time, she nevertheless strikes up a relationship with an oddball drifter (Shannon) with a sketchy past. The budding romance is interrupted when Agnes’s ex-husband returns—and then by a mysterious bug infestation that proves difficult to stamp out. Sporting rumpled, stringy hair and a perpetually wary look in her eyes, Judd gives a career-best performance, keeping the film anchored as Friedkin gradually shifts from realism into a different register altogether (the film even shares a trope with Philip K. Dick’s A Scanner Darkly). The last half hour unfolds inside an alternate visual reality, with Agnes’s apartment encased in crinkling aluminum foil. The nature of the bugs may eventually become clear, but Bug ultimately withholds more than it reveals.Author: Joshua Land
Time Out Chicago Issue 117: May 24-May 30, 2007
Cast & crew
Director: William Friedkin
Cast: Ashley Judd, Michael Shannon, Harry Connick Jr, Brian O'Byrne, Lynn Collins full cast
Duration: 101 mins
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