MOVIE REVIEW: Bug - Not Your Average Thriller

By Brian Abrams

The artwork on the poster for William Friedkin’s Bug carries the weight of your everyday supernatural thriller. With Ashley Judd’s mug front and center, the remainder of the advertisement is dark, covered in spooky shades of black and blue.

It gives you the feeling that the movie follows the footsteps of your typical creature feature in which a large cockroach chases innocent victims down subway lines or of one where the leading lady has telekinetic powers and figures out a way to make beehives fall onto her asshole neighbors’ heads. Yep, pure studio marketing at its finest – just the sort of generic poster design that is purported to reel in the Friday night fright masses.

If that were the case with Bug – and it isn’t – we could take comfort in engaging in such an innocuous, familiar plot. And, of course, writer/director Friedkin would be expected to make something so blah considering he arguably hasn’t directed anything good since 1992, when he helmed an episode of HBO’s Tales from the Crypt.

But Bug may very well be the best picture he’s headed up since his golden year glory days in the early 70s, directing Oscar-worthy flicks like The Exorcist and The French Connection. And I suppose what makes this movie so damn good is that it’s as far off from a clichéd scare title as imaginable.

Bug resembles a David Cronenberg picture way before it’s even near Roger Corman fare. We spend the majority of the movie inside a highway-side motel room in Oklahoma, where a downtrodden cocktail waitress named Agnes (Judd) spends her time sucking on wine bottles, snorting coke, and brooding over the pitiful details of her adult life.

One night her friend brings over a party guest, Peter (Michael Shannon), who connects with Agnes. They end up convalescing one another inside the roach motel for days. The plot for the first half hour or so keeps to a crawl, and for good reason. Friedkin and screenwriter Tracy Letts (who adapted the script from his play) slowly unravel the pair’s stories, disclosing bits and pieces about their unfortunate lives.

Eventually, secrets are shared, plant lice are found in the bed sheets, and Bug takes a bizarre turn away from the drab getting-to-know-you indie and heads straight into a crazy psychosexual, politically-paranoid mindfuck. To say much more about Bug and its nuttiness would be doing you a disservice. With all the curveballs thrown around within the film, you begin to wonder if the poster artwork itself was more than just a marketing trick.

Maybe the brains behind the operation – studio marketers included – wanted to create a curveball experience from the very beginning, right when you saw the misleading black-and-blue poster at the bus stop or, even scarier, in the subway.