Bug is a masterpiece. It is a compelling character study, a romance, a horror film, and a thriller incorporating elements of science fiction. It is a bold return to greatness from William Friedkin, who made two of the best films of the 70's, The French Connection and The Exorcist. Bug is even better than those films, and will certainly be on my list of the best films of 2007.
It is often said that is harder to make a movie based on a play than one based on a novel, because the theatrical form is inherently uncinematic. Aside from a few early scenes set a bar and a supermarket, the entire film of Bug is set in a cheap Oklahoma hotel room. The story involves a woman named Agnes White. Agnes is played by Ashley Judd, in a performance that deserves an Academy Award. She is an ordinary woman who has lived a tragic life. Her abusive ex-husband (Harry Conneck, Jr.) has just been released from prison and harassing her, and she still has not recovered from the disappearance of her young son years ago. She is bored with her own life, which is boredom punctuated by misery and drugs. One evening, she meets up with her friend R.C. (Lynn Collins) at a bar and meets one her aquatences, a nice but eccentric man named Peter Evans (Michael Shannon). Agnes and Peter develop a friendship that later turns into an act of desperation, and then incredible but totally believable (well sort of, you'll know what I mean) begin to happen.
Bug is like another great film, Bunny Lake is Missing. Both movies exploit the cinematic form to simultaneously show what appears to be an objective view of events while taking us inside the characters minds. Lake had four distinct points of view- the uncle, the mother, the detective and the camera. Bug straddles these lines a bit- it appears that the first half is entirely from Agnes's point of view, which is the same as the camera's, but then something strange happens, and we loose our objectivity. How much of this is in Peter's mind? How much is Agnes's? How much is Friedkin showing us what is "objectively" happening?
All this would be only a mere academic exercise if there were not characters that we could care about in get involved with, but I felt the plight of Agnes deeply. We understand the change she makes in the film totally- her life is so ordinary and banal that it is psychologically appealing to her to place herself in any meta-narrative or mythology, no matter how ridiculous. Peter, although a genuinely kind man, is not a good choice for her, but she clings to him because he is nice even when no one else will be. They go down an unpredictable to path that is either tragic or noble and heroic, depending on your point of view. And thus Bug is a lot more than a simple horror movie- it's a real human tale of lives that get caught in an inexplicable spiral downward, which to Agnes might be better than a slow journey into poverty and middle age. After the film ends, I was reminded of Kurt Cobain wrote on his suicide note: "It's better to burn out than to fade away".
Bug (2006)