Never a fan of The Exorcist, nor Lionsgate’s trailer for this, I watched Bug with reservations. I’d been hearing all kinds of praise for Michael Shannon around the internet, but I’d never seen him star in a film before this one, though he played a weak role well in Revolutionary Road. The truth is that as great as Shannon is in this, Ashley Judd is even better, and the two of them lead an all-around extremely well acted cast. I didn’t know that this was an off-Broadway play until after I was finished watching it, but I couldn’t stop thinking about how much this felt like a play while I was watching it, as pretty much all of the film consists of dialogue between Judd and Shannon in a motel. The first half of this plays like an engaging, yet standard, study on relationship abuse. Judd’s Agnes is haunted by her guilt of losing her son, who was kidnapped at a grocery story under her supervision about a decade before the film takes place. Her ex, Jerry, has just been released from prison, and is anxious to get back in Agnes’ life to terrorize her simply because he is an asshole. The real meat of the film, though, is brought in after Agnes and Shannon’s Peter hook up one night. Soon after they sleep together, edited cleverly with archival footage of mating insects, Peter begins forming bite marks from tiny aphids that he finds in the motel. Agnes begins to be bitten by the bugs, too, and the two begin searching for the aphids obsessively, and researching not only how to get rid of them, but how they got into their room in the first place.
This film is one of the scariest and most tragic examinations of trust, abuse, and madness that I have seen. I was reading a few articles in the news after I watched this, and, still under a daze from the movie, I couldn’t tell if what I was reading was believable or a hoax. I’m finding it hard to write about this even now, because it affected me so viscerally. The final act was like an extension of the hungry refrigerator scene from Requiem for a Dream. The blues and the buzzing and the spastic characters were incredibly unnerving for me. The film is also very funny since it’s so over-the-top at times. But anyway, I can’t stop thinking about this, even though I can’t seem to put any of my thoughts on it into words. Its unfortunate that the horrible marketing kept me away from it so long.
I think Judd’s performance is one of the acting highlights of the decade. I can think of very few actors who could pull off some of the dialogue, emotion and intensity she did here.