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Cast: Ashley Judd (Agnes White), Michael Shannon (Peter Evans)
Directed by: William Friedkin
Release date: May 2007
Based on the play ‘Bug’ by Tracy Letts

Guess I’d rather talk with you about bugs than nothing with nobody.

Bug is a claustrophobic nightmare, an acid trip down a hellish path of no return. It does not say anything profound but it is pretty effective little shocker. The first shot is of a guy lying prostrate in a room covered in tin foil. Then it cuts to aerial shots of a motel, with creepy background noise like murmurings. It’s clear that this is not going to be a movie with a happy ending. Over the next ninety minutes, we track two broken individuals feeding off each other’s psychotic paranoia. Till they lose any vestiges of sanity and move into auto self-destruct mode.

Agnes is living alone in a rundown room in the seedy Rustic Motel. She works as a waitress in a lesbian bar. Years with an abusive husband and the loss of a child have scarred her deeply. There is mix of loneliness and fear in her bleary eyes. At night, she stays up staring at the fan, listening to the drone of the exhaust. One night, her best friend RC, who works with her introduces her to Peter. They go back to the motel room to snort coke and party. Peter is taciturn and awkward in his behavior. Agnes jokes with RC that he might be an axe-murderer. But he appears the harmless loser type. He turns out to be something a lot worse.

Agnes has been receiving blank calls. Her husband Jerry got out of prison recently. She thinks it might be him. So, when Peter asks if he can spend the night on the couch, Agnes is more than happy to let him. After all, he is company. The next day Jerry appears on the scene. He slaps Agnes around for a while and then leaves. Following his departure, the delusions begin with Peter jumping up in bed at night. He claims to have been bitten by an aphid. Pretty soon, he announces the room is infested with bugs. Agnes also sees the bugs after a while. All the X-files conspiracy theories are imaginatively utilized by them to construct an elaborate explanation of the events.

The movie gets intensely violent and quite gory during the last one-third. The scope of the film is limited and it is a bit predictable too in its morbid proceedings. But the director lets his actors take over. Their no-holds barred acting is what makes it different from the multitude of B-grade horror movies. Ashley Judd in one of her best performances creates a convincing and disturbing portrayal of a spiralling descent into insanity. Michael Shannon reprising his stage role is freakishly scary and displays a manic energy. There is a palpable desperation in their holding on to each other. They able to pull us in with the conviction of their performances.

William Friedkin, the director of The exorcist and The French connection faded into oblivion along with his seventies contemporaries Francis Ford Coppola and Peter Bogdanovich. Now he is back after almost three decades with this bare bones exploration of a deranged psyche. It is an entertaining low-budget genre movie but is not able to transcend its boundaries to be something greater or pathbreaking. I guess it will take more to announce that Friedkin is back in top form.